Dusk

Chapter 13

LENORA, LIEUTENANT TOthe Mages, scarred from countless battles and her burning need for revenge, resident of Dana’Man for three hundred years but originally a Noreelan, circled her hawk high above the port of Newland and watched the preparations for war. Excitement coursed through her, because she knew where she would soon be heading. Excitement, and a calm sense of destiny moving things on. This moment was when her life would change again, and though she had been preparing for centuries, the actual instant was as sweet and satisfying as she had always hoped.

Below her, Dana’Man was a wasteland of snow and ice. A few lonely rocks protruded from the white blanket here and there. The stains of the Krote encampments on the lower hillsides were the only splashes of color, and it was so obvious that they did not truly belong. Mountains loomed above them, their dormant volcanic tips pointing skyward as if striving forever to reach the sun. It would never happen. This land had been cursed long before the Mages and their surviving Krotes had arrived, and it would remain cursed long after they left.

She circled, her hawk spreading its webbed tentacles to catch the meager thermals rising up from the town below. She could make out several warships in the harbor, their edges blurred by the movement of hundreds of people loading more equipment and weapons. Smaller vessels bobbed alongside, and farther out in the bay, constantly dodging chunks of ice many times their size, dozens more warships awaited the signal to depart. Even this high up there was a thrill in the air, a hint of excitement that Lenora had not felt for three centuries. Through all their time here-their catastrophic arrival, the battles that followed, the eventual subduing of the people they had found already living in this forsaken land-there had never been anything to really offer hope. Now Lenora thought that everything they had lived for down the years may well come true, something that even she had sometimes doubted. Fully armed and ready to fly south, she felt her love for the Mages glowing as strong as ever.

Their summons had come just that morning, and she had flown a hawk up into the Mages’ remote mountain keep. They had told her of the whispers from Noreela-the Nax awake, the Red Monks on the move-and she had not asked how they knew. They had their spies and ways. The implication of their words was huge; that magic was back in the land! She had seen the light of exhilaration in their ancient eyes, and Lenora left knowing that this was her last day on Dana’Man. She had packed her weapons and clothing without a moment’s regret.

Every breath froze her lungs, every thought was informed by the cold. This high up, Lenora picked up layers of sparkling frost on her face and clothing as the hawk drifted through hazy clouds. Her bald head glittered with ice. Her furs and leathers were stiff and cracked from the cold, but her blood burned inside, filled with rage and anticipation of the weeks to come. Soon she would feel the warmth of the Noreelan sun on her skin again. And then, when the fighting was done and magic was back in the hands of the Mages, Lenora would be free to seek her own very personal revenge.

There was movement far below, a hundred specks passing across the snowfields and then drifting across the harbor, rising higher and coming up to meet her. Her Krote warriors on their hawks. They all knew their mission, and she sensed their eagerness, heard it in the shouts and laughter that accompanied their approach. Weapons glinted in the ice-cold sunlight, and Lenora could not recall the last time she had seen so many of her warriors smiling.

They circled their mighty hawks above the harbor for several minutes, shouting to one another, waving good-bye to the snow and ice, full of bravado yet doubtless harboring their own private thoughts: relief and trepidation; excitement and fear. Each Krote carried arrows and stars, shield and slingshot, pouches and bottles of various poisons. Singly they were fearsome; together, in a group so large, they looked like the end of the world.

“Let’s go and find some sun!” Lenora shouted. She was the first to peel away from the formation and dip her hawk’s nose, heading out to sea. Warships passed by below her, then a couple of small coastal patrols, and then within minutes the sea’s surface was disturbed only by giant icebergs, and the occasional splash of something huge rising and submerging again.

Lenora had dreamed of this forever. As they flew south toward Noreela for the first time in three hundred years, she remembered the day she left…

SOMEHOW IT HADall gone wrong. The Mages-the exiled Shantasi Mystic S’Hivez and his lover, Angel-had lived so many dreams, won so many rapid victories, drawn so much power to their sides in the magic they had twisted to their ways… and now they and the remnants of their army fought their final defense on the northernmost beaches of Noreela. Disbelief clouded Lenora’s vision. It was a hazy red, the color of life, as if blood were teasing her eyes before leaking away forever. She had no doubt that she was going to die. Whatever strange powers the Mages once had, the ferocity of the Noreelan people’s army had shattered her confidence, leaving it strewn across the Noreelan landscape and trodden down into battle-bloodied soil. They had been fighting for weeks, and the only end in sight was death.

The beaches here on this nameless island were wide, high dunes marking the dividing line between sand and the lush forests farther inland. Some of the dunes sprouted corpses, like sapling trees seeking the sun, and the hollows in between were quagmires of blood and guts. The dead outnumbered the living, and their majority was growing every minute. Several days earlier the two Mages had still been able to raise dead Krotes and throw them back at the enemy-shambling zombies that the Noreelans could only stop by hacking to pieces. And ten days before that-at the Battle of Lake Denyah-dead Krotes’ wraiths had been forced into battle by the Mages, a nebulous army that could not be stabbed or killed. Now they could do neither, and each Krote killed merely reduced their army by one more.

The Krotes were trapped between land and sea, on a stretch of beach maybe half a mile in length. They were harried at both ends by Noreelans mounted or on foot, while from the forests beyond the sand dunes came frequent machine attacks. The Noreelan war machines were graceful things, long legs and scything arms that kicked or cut Krotes aside every time they attacked. Some of them had been brought down-their mounts slaughtered, the machines themselves hacked at until they came apart-but still metal limbs thrashed at the sand, and ruptured stone bodies leaked blood and other fluids as they thumped across the beach.

The Mages’ final machines had failed two days ago. As the last one ground to a halt and tipped over, crushing its rider, it was already stinking of decay. Lenora had stood aside in stunned disbelief as the Mage S’Hivez shouted and raged at the dead machine, throwing pulses of sickly light at its clotted arteries and molten metal joints. It had done no good, of course, and the Krotes had fled on foot. The Mages had drifted overhead, directing the battle from atop their hawks and sweeping down now and then to pluck up a screaming Noreelan. Several times Lenora had seen these unfortunate victims thrown from the hawks’ backs, shriveled and denuded from their brief time with the Mages. Loose-limbed and bloodless. Eyes sucked from their sockets. The viciousness of the Mages had encouraged her to keep fighting.

The sand beneath her feet was sticky with blood, clotting to her leather shoes and slowing her down. She tripped over hacked-off limbs and headless bodies. Someone grasped at her ankle and she kicked him away, spitting down at the wounded Krote’s face. His fight was over, hers was still at its height. If she remembered, she would go back soon to put him out of his misery.

She fought at their left flank, hacking at advancing Noreelans with her heavy sword. She had run out of stars and discs and arrows long ago, and she had lost her slingshot when it became embedded in a Noreelan’s spine. That had torn a swath of skin from her right forearm, and now sand was stinging the wound. The agony kept her awake and alive, maintained the rage that had driven her for days, ever since they had burst from the Mages’ keep and forced the Noreelan army back into Lake Denyah.

Then something had happened. Her memory of it was vague, its taste rank in her mouth, but it had been bad; a change in the air, a shiver through the ground as the land took a breath. At the height of battle, victory had been snatched from them. The Mages’ grasp on defiled magic had held for a dozen more days, but a purer magic had seemed to present a final defense, empowering the Noreelans to launch a counterattack in such huge numbers that the Krote army had been overwhelmed. For every ten thousand Noreelans they killed, twenty thousand took their place. Zombies of Krote dead waded into the throng, taking twenty with them before they were hacked to pieces. Wraiths spun and thrashed, whipping at the flesh of the enemy and opening them to steam into the night, before Noreelan priests managed to put them down. The untrained Noreelan army had gathered momentum, sucking power from the land and launching it at the Krote army with wave after wave of machine attacks. Surprised, overwhelmed, the flight north had begun.

It had been one long fight until they reached the sea. Days without rest. Nights lit by the flaming fat of burning bodies. Those who tired fell behind and were slaughtered. Those who fought gained wounds as their badges of honor, and a creeping madness borne of exhaustion and the inevitability of what was to come. Lenora-a simple warrior then-had looked again and again to the Mages, expecting them to throw down some mighty defense. Their magic simmered darkly around their forms, heaving as they danced across and above the battlefields. But if they did try to fight back, the effects were so small as to go unnoticed. Dead Krotes shivered on the ground instead of rising to their calling. Shadows flitted from the corner of her eye, but these wraiths were all but gone.

The Noreelans drove on, pecking at the tail of the fleeing Krote army with their loping machines, and a thick line of blood was painted across Noreela.

And then they reached The Spine, hopping from island to island in stolen boats, until they ended up at this place. At least before now they were on the move, and even falling to the enemy had felt positive because it gave fellow Krotes a chance to move on. Here, on this golden beach turned red, the battle was simply an ongoing slaughter.

Lenora screamed as she parried a sword blow from a big Noreelan, ducked down and hacked at his stomach. Coils of gray guts spilled out and he looked at her in surprise. “Help,” he whispered. She buried her blade in his face and wrenched, hearing bone crack as he fell. Another took his place, a woman already bearing terrible wounds to her neck and chest. Lenora gave her some more, then stamped her face into the sand and smothered her while fighting off a young boy. The lad was vicious and determined, but even when he buried a knife in Lenora’s side she merely shrugged him off and hacked him across the throat. It was just another wound, one more step nearer death, and the closer death came the more she was ready to welcome it in. The rage was good and pure. The fury at the unfairness of things-the Mages and their followers had gained and lost so much, in such a short time-drove her on, into the embrace of this new Noreelan attack. She hacked left and right, screaming, her bloody face terrifying her attackers. The day before an arrow had sliced off some of her scalp, and she had shaved her head so that the terrible gash would be on view. Several times her foes’ eyes drifted up to her weeping wound, giving her the opportunity to gut them with a simple thrust of her blade. The more wounds she took, the closer death loomed, but it became easier to mete out death as well.

Behind her, farther along the beach, the Mages were hunkered down behind a protective cordon of Krotes. Again and again the Noreelan machines sprang from the forest, strode or slid across the dunes and down the beach. And again and again the Krote warriors drove them back, at terrible expense. Hundreds lay dead, their slippery wet bodies offering added protection against the machines. Those left alive all bore injuries, some with simple cuts and bruises, others missing limbs or holding in their insides. Several machines lay across the beach. Their former Noreelan riders were little more than smudges in the sand-when they did manage to bring a machine down, the Krotes expended their fury upon its rider-and all but one of the machines now lay still, shattered and burned and melted by dregs of the Mages’ magic.

Because dregs were all they had left. Earlier that day Lenora had seen them rise from within the circle and direct a sustained attack of shadowy fire at an advancing machine. It had taken all their strength and concentration to bring it down, and even then their warriors had to advance to finish the job. A week earlier they had been blasting troop ships from Lake Denyah and scything down a hundred Noreelan attackers with a wave of their hand. Now the Mages could barely summon fire. Magic had given, and so it took away.

Still Lenora fought. Her faith in the Mages was as strong as ever; it was the devious magic she no longer trusted. Caught by the Mages, it had refused to stay caught. And though she still felt it thrumming through her bones, Lenora was certain that something was about to change.

The sun was growing weak. The air seemed lighter than usual, less refreshing. The trees behind the beach had started to shed brown wrinkled leaves, though they had only bloomed a few weeks before. Even when this battle was over, Lenora thought, its effect would have only just begun.

Her final memory of being on the beach was of a machine rearing up before her. Its legs were shimmering, fiery things, and its rider screeched, his face red not with blood, but with rage. The machine’s legs swished this way and that, scorching Krotes into charcoal shells. The rider fired arrows and followed every one with a growl. When he glared at Lenora she was certain that she was going to die. His eyes burned so deep-

And then something struck her across the shoulder, and pain like she had never imagined took her away.

LENORA SOARED ABOVEand ahead of her Krote warriors. Far to the south lay Noreela, and that beach where she had fallen. Much farther south than that, nestled in the mountains east of Lake Denyah, the village of Robenna. This is where she had been born and raised so long ago-an unassuming sprawl of dwellings, shops and farms that had made its living trading fruit from natural mountain fields. She had called it home, and from there she had been driven-pelted with stones, whipped with poison-tipped sticks-for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The child was a memory now, drawn from her sickening body and taken into the Black one night in the foothills of Kang Kang, but the anger she felt at that place still simmered. Every act she had performed since then had been in the name of her dead daughter. At first she had felt only bitterness at the destruction of a life that could have meant so much. Then the rage had driven her mad, and the only place she found succor and acceptance had been as a part of the Mages’ army. The bitterness had matured gradually into an all-consuming hate, tinted by the voice of her unborn daughter; laughing, crying, telling her mother how much she would have liked to live.

Others told her it was madness, but Lenora was convinced that it was her daughter’s shade-her homeless soul, shorn of potential-remaining with her mother. Lost and useless. Abandoned and alone. And the only way Lenora could quieten that voice was to seek vengeance in its name.

On the day she was driven from Noreela, the voice of her unborn daughter fell silent. But Lenora had always nurtured that hate, and she had made a silent promise that, should the chance arise, Robenna would burn at her hand.

As they drifted south she wondered whether her daughter would be waiting for her on the beach.

ALISHIA AND THEfledge miner came down from the mountain slopes and headed west. She was shocked at how long they had slept-the afternoon had faded into evening by the time she screamed herself awake-and she suddenly felt unsafe remaining in the foothills. There were things in the mountains that had stalked Trey, killed his friends and family, and now as night approached she feared that they would come aboveground, hunting through the dusk as they had slaughtered their way through the eternal darkness belowground. The miner had remained silent on the matter, sitting atop Alishia’s horse, bent forward and hugging its mane as he sobbed through his grief. If this is what meeting a Nax did to someone, Alishia had no desire to stay close to where they might surface.

And there was something else moving her on. The thing that had reached out for her while she slept the fledge sleep. That utter darkness, a void, repulsing her and fascinating her in equal measures. Instinct tore her away and told her to flee, while her intellect demanded to know more. Her fear, remembered from the dream like a taste or a smell, had been the purest fear of her life. Knowledge from books did not impart that level of emotion. Erv had disconcerted her, and some of the things she had seen in Noreela City had sometimes made her scared to wander the streets, but she had never before been as truly frightened as in that dream.

Upon waking, the screaming still stinging her throat, she had already begun to deconstruct and analyze the fear.

As a child she had nightmares when she was ill. She could never explain them to herself, let alone to others, although thinking about them still disturbed her even now. There had been a sense of space so huge that it belittled her and her existence, made her less than a gasp in a storm. She stood on a hill and the space closed in around her. Nothingness itself took on a weight and a pressure, grinding her down even though she was nothing, taking her away from the center of things so that she regarded herself as meaningless, an insignificant pollutant in the purity of void. As she grew older she tried to ally this space, this endless, pressing void, with the experience she lacked. A whole world sat around her and she had seen nothing of it. But however much she suspected this, in truth she knew that it was not the case. Her knowledge may be secondhand, but that was no reason for her to fear the world.

The thing that had reached out in her fledge dream provoked the same sense of fear as those sickening childhood dreams, but now it was much more real. Because even now, awake, Alishia was terrified.

Something beyond her experience had intruded into her sleep. She was horribly certain that had she not screamed herself awake, it would have come closer, until it finally touched her for real.

Trey sat huddled on the horse, shielding his face from the fading daylight as if he could make his own cave, take himself back belowground. Alishia heard him crying from time to time, but after her first couple of attempts to comfort him she decided to leave him be. She had read that the best way to temper grief was by letting it run its course.

If he had noticed that a small amount of his fledge was missing, he said nothing. Neither did he mention her screams as she had come awake. Maybe he thought she always slept with nightmares.

Alishia held her horse’s reins and led it down out of the foothills. She glanced back from time to time and saw shadows hiding on the slopes, huddled beneath rocky overhangs or sitting comfortably in cave entrances. But the setting sun was keeping them at bay, bathing the hillsides in its rich golden light, blurring the mountains’ sharpness as it struck a cloud bank far to the west and turned slowly pink. She walked faster, conscious that night was coming and keen to find somewhere suitable to camp on the plains below.

Noreela City was out of sight now, hidden behind the hips of the first mountain, even its glow no longer marking its location as dusk settled comfortably across the land. For the first time in her life she could look around and not see something of the city. She did not miss its excesses, cruelties, corruption, carelessness, murders, the screams at night or the cries in the day as another dose of skewed justice was meted out. And yet she did miss the city itself. It had always been her home, however distasteful it had become. Memories both good and bad stood out sharply as she increased the distance between herself and the city.

Intruding into her recollections, shadows crept around her.

She dwelled a little on the library she had been charged with keeping and maintaining. There had been little added to it during her time there, save for the occasional traveler leaving roughly copied tomes for her to catalog and lose amidst the ancient stacks. A whole building filled with more knowledge than one person could ever hope to attain. That place had been wondrous, and its loss hit her more keenly now that she had left the city than when it had burned down. Even then the evidence of it had remained, carbonized stacks of old paper and dead knowledge leaning drunkenly in the smoke, soaked to mulch with water and awaiting their final demise. Now it was only memory. But at least it was a memory true to her, something she had experienced firsthand, reveled in, smelled and touched and tasted, the library air redolent of a million different stories.

Alishia thought of the broken book the old man had carried out, and as she approached a huge boulder light was stolen from beneath it, and a shadow watched her pass. She steered the horse to one side and slipped the knife from her thigh, feeling foolish with the petty weight of metal in her hand. The shadow remained in place, and if it had eyes they did not blink. She glanced back a few times, and as it receded behind her the rock seemed to merge with the shadow, being swallowed or swallowing the darkness itself. It remained in place, brooding, threatening to expand and follow her down.

The hillside was flattening out slowly onto the plains, punctured here and there by deep holes, old surface workings or perhaps the homes of some unknown creatures long since vanished. Each hole offered a new shadow to seep beneath the ferns, spreading dark fingers where light no longer fell.

Alishia glanced up at Trey. He was still in some sort of fugue, sitting up now but with his eyes closed, lolling in the saddle as if he would fall off at any moment. He had never ridden a horse, he had said, but his long legs made it easy for him to grip its sides and remain in the saddle. She wished he would talk to her. She felt even more alone than she had upon leaving the city.

She thought of the old man who she was sure had burned down her library, and the shadows closed in again. There had been something about him, a niggling memory deep in her mind, but she could not dig down to it. His manner, his age, his language, his attire… they all stirred a memory of something she had read, something she knew. Her eyes drooped and she strolled along the aisles of the library in memory, running her fingers along book spines and recognizing every one, the names and titles and obscure publishing houses all known to her. She pulled out one book entitled The Quest for Retribution, a hate-filled tome that had been written soon after the Cataclysmic War. It called for an expedition northward to ensure that the Mages were properly accounted for, tied down, killed. It had been popular in its day, but it was one of a slew of reactionary literature that had flooded Noreela at the exact time that it needed optimism, not vengeance. Yet that had been a rich time in the literature of the land, and the sudden slurring of conventions and ideals, edging even the most creative and intellectual of writers to more radical outlooks, had been the start of the fall. People should have seen it, Alishia had always thought. They should have noticed that society was in a decline by the way the arts strove to refocus direction, diverting away from the more philosophical and cerebral explorations to those ruled more by animal instinct: conflict; survival; vengeance.

Alishia stumbled on a rock and went to her knees, calling out in surprise. She looked around quickly, startled and shocked. The sun had fallen and darkness had come out of the ground, closing in all around her, giving shadows more depth and potential than ever. Something was watching her from out there; she could feel its attention upon her. A thought floated away, leaving only the stale taste of itself behind. Something about the library, and the Mages, and anger. She shook her head, wondering whether she was suffering from a fledge hangover.

“You fell,” Trey said from his mount.

“You’re awake!” Alishia was embarrassed at the delight in her voice, but relief soon smothered the embarrassment. It was dark, there was something out there in the night, and now she was no longer alone.

“I have been for a while. I’ve been thinking. I’ve lost so much, and I really don’t know what to do now.”

“We have to find a place to camp,” Alishia said. “It’s too dark to keep moving, there are holes and crevasses to trip us. And besides, I need to light a fire. There’s something stalking me.” Not stalking us, Alishia thought. Me. It was a strange way to state her fear, but it seemed entirely apt.

“What is it?” Trey asked. His eyes were wide open now that the sun had gone down, and Alishia saw him stare in wonder at clouds silvered and smudged by starlight.

“I don’t know. Something. I had a crumb of your fledge. I hope you don’t mind, but I was curious and… I wonder if it may be because of that. Maybe I’m imagining things.”

“You had fledge?” Trey asked. Alishia found his tone disturbing, and she stepped away. Here was a stranger she had found on a mountainside, alone with her in the dark. Her knife felt even more ineffectual than ever.

“Only a little.”

“What do you sense?”

“I don’t know. Something in the shadows.”

“Nax,” Trey said, so softly that Alishia was not sure he had actually spoken at all. The horse whinnied as if in response. “It’s the Nax,” he said again. “Now that it’s night they’ve come up! Nothing left for them down there. They’ve come up to put right what woke them in the first place!” He was raving now, fear given voice, and in the deepening darkness his shout was louder than ever.

“I haven’t seen anything,” Alishia said, not entirely sure if that was true.

Perhaps the fledge miner’s fear translated to the horse. Or maybe the horse itself sensed something then, the watchful thing Alishia had known in her dreams and which she now sensed in the surrounding shadows. Whatever the cause, the result was inevitable. The horse bolted. Alishia ran after them, mindful of the uneven ground and the holes she had seen, but desperate not to lose her horse, and with it the saddlebags and all her belongings. Trey fell and rolled across the ground, and the horse ran on, galloping into the night until it was little more than a shadow itself.

Alishia shouted in frustration. And then she heard the sickening sound of breaking bones, something big hit the ground, and the horse cried out in agony.

She tripped and struck her head on a rock. She was sure, even as pain took sensation away into unconsciousness, that she had tripped over nothing but shadow.

THE SHADE REDISCOVEREDthe mind down in the real world, still possessed of dregs of the freedom that had attracted the shade so much. It hovered for a while, noticing the passing of time purely via the changing of the mind it focused upon. The mind soared and dreamed and traveled in a rich vein of knowledge, opening itself up more than any the shade had yet encountered. It had been drawn back here by that openness, and the fact that such simplicity would surely be receptive to any signs of magic, hints that things were not quite as they had been. And it was this that the shade’s god sought.

Again and again, skimming beyond the world, dipping in on occasion to gain experience and feel the slick shock of existence, the shade tried to tap into the mind. It offered itself first, giving the mind something to focus on, but it must have frightened it away instead. It had no way to lure-it was essentially nothing but future memory, so what could it possibly offer a mind of such magnitude?-and so instead it had to inveigle its way inside. It would use its pure, untempered instinct for life, the one sense that its god had perpetuated and encouraged and which nature, by judging it as an imperfect example of its sort, had sought to take away. And this life had the god at its center. The shade put ideas of its god into the mind’s way, letting it stumble and trip and absorb, drawing it up out of the real world until it began to soar again, questing knowledge. Still it veered away from the shade, afraid of its blankness, but the shade persisted, planting more ideas, steering the mind, hovering and struggling to find a crack through which it would penetrate to become corporeal at last.

That crack came unbeckoned.

The mind suddenly exploded up and out of the real world, a maelstrom of confused emotions blended with pain and surprise. The shade backed away and let the mind soar, expand, open itself out until it settled once again just beyond the boundaries of unreality. There it dreamed and reveled once again in its knowledge. But there was something ever-present-a worry, a fear, a dread-that the shade could work on.

It approached, dipped down and found itself sharing.

The mind recoiled. The shade rejoiced. It spread itself and was instantly dizzied by the sensations and emotions therein. There was pain and the taste of grass and mud, the sound of distant shouting and the sense of a heartbeat, fast and irregular, grasped in an icy fist of fear. It opened its mouth and shouted, felt the thing it had become shouting along with it, raising a voice that echoed back again and again. It could smell heather and blood, feel something sharp pressing into its face and something soft and cool next to that, tickling its mouth.

It was a person. Its name was Alishia.

The shade screamed again from sheer delight and Alishia jumped to her feet, laughing and spinning around, tripping and jarring her knees and palms on rough rock, hardly noticing the pain.

For a few seconds that she could not explain, Alishia reveled in the simple fact that she was alive. And that life was rich with potential.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk