Dusk

Chapter 20

RAFE BABURN WAStired. He sat in the cave mouth and watched the witch out in the rain, her arms outstretched as she communed with the skull ravens. The downpour was tremendous, and yet Hope seemed unconcerned. One raven had its beak pressed hard against her temple. They looked like one merged creature.

Rafe’s eyelids drooped again, the rainfall soporific, his limbs and shoulders aching, his eyes stinging from exhaustion. Whatever he had done the night before had drained him. He felt hollowed out, distanced from everything-the danger, his parents’ deaths, these people around him-and even the voices and whispers had grown quiet.

The Shantasi warrior who had been prepared to die to save Rafe’s life-her skin slashed and torn, her ankle shattered, her face a mask of drying, poisoned blood-was slumped farther back in the cave. Kosar the thief sat watching over her, dripping water into her mouth. She moaned in her sleep and sometimes cried out, but the noise of the storm drowned her voice. She was unconscious. The poison was gone from her system. She bled only good blood now. Rafe had cured her.

The touch had not been his own. The surge of something through his arm and hand had risen up from somewhere so deep inside that it was beyond him. There had been a stench as the poison was drawn from her system and scorched by the fresh air, the smell of something rank dying on the breeze, and Rafe had fallen away from the injured Shantasi, vomiting. The witch had caught him and lowered him to the ground, so gently. Like a glass sculpture.

He remembered little since then, other than occasional glimpses of moonlight and the sensation of being carried through the night. There had been whispers around him, amazed muttering, tones of disbelief and faith, anger and relief, pain and epiphany. He had felt as if he was being carried out and away from his old life at last, and transported toward something new and wondrous. Sometime in the night the rain had come, and they had found the cave. Since then it had been quiet.

Rafe supposed that, like him, his companions were trying to come to terms with what had happened.

HOPE SHOOK THElast skull raven from her shoulder. It screeched as it flew off, merging quickly with the night, mocking her with one last cry. She cursed, stooping to pick up one of the raven’s feathers from the mud. It was smooth and silky. The moonlight caught its perfect edge and it glinted like a knife. The witch put it to her nose and inhaled, but it revealed nothing more.

“Piss and vomit!” she hissed. Perhaps it was the rain, but she could not commune with the ravens. They had taken her invitation willingly enough, sat on her shoulders and outstretched arms, but they were taking, not giving. She had felt the feathery touch of their own senses inside her mind as they pressed themselves to her, their seeking of secrets, but unlike the day before she could not read them. It was not something she had done often, but she knew the methods and the risks. There should have been no reason why it could not work again. Look for the Red Monks, she had tried to convey, but they had not listened. They were closed to her now.

Hope trudged back to where the others sat. It was more a hollow than a cave, a natural depression in the hillside sheltered by an overhanging shelf of rock, but it kept them hidden from the storm and prying eyes. The night was dark, the moons peering intermittently from behind low-lying clouds, and they dared not risk lighting a fire. The Red Monks were likely still searching for them, and they all needed a night’s rest to recover from their exertions.

There he is, Hope thought, smiling at Rafe. He sat awake just beneath the overhang, water pouring from the rocks above and splashing down at his feet. There’s my precious boy. He smiled back weakly, his eyes as fluid and confused as the stormy sky. Hope reached out to touch his head but then walked by, awed, afraid, confused about what the signs meant. From their first meeting she had believed in Rafe, but after last night-after he had touched the Shantasi and drawn out the slayer spider’s poison-her belief had expanded into fear. She was a witch, had been one her whole life, but this boy’s single touch made a mockery of anything she had achieved. Being a witch in a time without magic consisted mainly of knowing things, shocking people with arcane secrets, frightening them if necessary with the forgotten qualities of nature and paths of the mind, and sometimes fooling them with exquisitely simple deceptions. For her, knowledge was power.

Rafe’s demonstration was the opposite, and infinitely more daunting because of that. He was a young boy, confused and shocked, and though he displayed such power he seemed to have no knowledge of it at all. It terrified him.

The boy stared into the night as if searching for answers, and Hope wanted to have him all for herself.

She walked farther back into the cave to where the others were trying to get some sleep. All of them were awake. All but the girl, Alishia, whose strange display had disturbed them all. The fledger sat with her head in his lap, stroking her hair, trying to whisper some life back into her eyes. They were open and staring and so vacant, as if reflecting the darkness from outside rather than showing the hollowness of herself.

“How is she?” Hope asked.

The fledger looked up. “She knew so much. Now she’s nothing.”

“It scared us all in different ways,” she said, thinking of her own ecstatic thrill as she had watched Rafe laying his hands on the Shantasi.

“It didn’t frighten me,” the fledger said. His comment was loaded, but Hope let it go. What else has he seen and known? she wondered.

She turned to Kosar the thief. He was tending A’Meer, using a damp cloth to wash clotted blood from her face, neck and scalp. She had some terrible wounds, but the pain had been drawn away along with the poison, and she had stitched several of her cuts together herself soon after they had entered the cave. Her sleep now was from pure exhaustion.

“I can’t talk to them,” she said. “The ravens. It was fine yesterday, but now they’re unreachable. I can’t shake the idea that they’re laughing at me even as I try to commune. I feel them rooting around in my head, and I wonder what they see, but they fly away and cry to the rain.”

“I wouldn’t trust them anyway,” Kosar said. “It’s unnatural. They might just lead us into a Red Monk’s trap.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Kosar dabbed at A’Meer’s chin, washing away dried blood to reveal the pale skin beneath.

“There could be dozens of them out there,” Hope said, “and they might be anywhere.” She sat on one of the saddles they had brought in out of the rain, trying to see through the curtain of dirty water that marked the cave entrance. If only she was the rain, all-seeing and innocent.

“I could see,” Trey Barossa said from across the cave. The downpour suddenly seemed to increase in ferocity, and a flash of lightning lit the plains for the briefest instant.

“I’ve heard about you fledgers,” Hope said. “I’ve met a few, and all of them addicts. All of them lost. They claim second sight, but all they see when they’re on their trips are their own deaths coming two steps closer.”

“I’m an addict of fledge as much as you are of false magic,” Trey said. Alishia stirred and moaned. Hope glanced at the girl and looked away quickly: her eyes were wide-open, staring across at the cave wall as if seeing something too terrible to bear.

“Careful what you say, boy,” the witch said. But there was no threat in her voice, not really, and the comment faded away. Circumstances had brought them together, and they had all witnessed something remarkable, something that still echoed in their thoughts. Hope was certain that they had observed the end of the old world and the beginning of the new.

“I can see,” Trey said again. “I have fresh fledge. The drug people take topside is old, traveled, stored. It’s tainted by exposure to the air. Taking old fledge is like eating rotten meat instead of fresh, and about as good for you. That’s why topsiders look down on fledgers; the ones you see up here are slowly poisoning themselves.”

“How far could you see?” Kosar asked.

Trey looked uncomfortable at this, so much so that Hope wondered just what he had seen on his last trip. He shrugged. “I’m not sure. And I’m not sure whether I could see something specific, or just anything that’s there. If the Monks are still out there I might miss them entirely and see a sheebok in the Widow’s Peaks.”

“If it’s that unreliable, it’s likely to mislead as much as help,” Hope said.

“It sounds more reliable than the skull ravens,” Kosar said. “And the night will be past soon. We’re still within shouting distance of Pavisse. The Monks have certainly fled the town to search for us, and we need to set off again. A’Meer will have to be tied in her saddle, and if Trey and Alishia are coming with us-”

“Why should they?” Hope asked.

Kosar raised his eyebrows.

“Why should they?” she repeated. “They know nothing of Rafe.”

“I know what I saw last night,” Trey said. “And I know what seeing that did to Alishia. I owe her a lot. She saved me…”

“You’ll put yourself in danger if you come with us,” Hope said. “There are Red Monks chasing us, do you know what a Red Monk can do? Do you have any idea what they are?” And besides, she thought, why should we share the boy with you? Why share him with anyone?

“I’ve seen worse,” the fledge miner said.

Hope scoffed, but Kosar spoke up.

“If he really has second sight with fledge, then he can help us, Hope. And if he’s willing to help, I’m more than willing to let him come along. I’m just a damn thief, I don’t know what’s going on here. We need all the help we can get.”

“Help us get caught,” Hope muttered.

Kosar stood, gently laying A’Meer’s head on a bundle of blankets. He approached Hope, wiping the Shantasi’s blood from his hands. “Where would you go?” he asked. “Which way, come daybreak? South, toward Kang Kang? Northwest to Long Marrakash, hoping that the Duke might be there, might be able to protect us from the Monks?”

“I don’t know,” Hope admitted. “But now we have him! He can protect us.”

Rafe looked back at the raised voices. He hugged his blanket closer around him and stared out at the rain once again.

“He’s more scared than all of us,” Kosar whispered. “We all know what we think we saw last night-”

“Magic!”

“That’s what we thought we saw, yes. But even Rafe is scared of that, and everything else happening around him. He may have driven the poison from A’Meer’s veins, but I don’t think he can help us yet. I think we still need to be helping him. If he has a gift, access to magic, whatever, it’s something that’s breaking him up. His parents were slaughtered before his eyes. You know that, Hope.”

“They weren’t even his real parents,” she said. She grimaced and glanced at the fledger. “Can you do it now?”

“Yes.” He reached across to his shoulder bag without letting Alishia slip from his lap. “Care to join me?” he asked.

“I think not.” Hope sat down opposite Trey and watched him draw a chunk of fledge from his bag. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

THE NAX WOULDbe waiting. He would take fledge, drift out from himself and the cave, search across the hillsides and through the shallow valleys for the Red Monks… and he would find the Nax. Touch their minds. Discover the truth: that it was him they sought, always him.

But that was craziness, brought on by the terrible few days gone by and the situation he now found himself in: sheltering from rain-which he had never seen before-with people he should have never known. And in his lap, twitching and mumbling incoherently, the stranger who had saved his life. For her more than anything Trey tried to rationalize his fears of the Nax, apply logic instead of terror, and he took his first bite of fledge.

He tasted the staleness of its outer coating. The air had touched it and its decline had begun, but he chewed past this mustiness and found the sweet dry warmth at its heart. The flavor reminded him immediately of home, bringing back sudden memories of his mother’s cooking, the ribald laughter of fledge miners as they took a food break, chanting from the cave floor. Lufero with his puppet show, Sonda smiling at him and glancing away again, always glancing away. Trey let the sensations flood in. The sound of the downpour outside the cave changed into the roar of the underground river, coming from and going to nowhere he would ever know. The tang of the rain was the cool tint of spray from the river, so far underground. And the weight of Alishia’s head resting on his legs, the warmth of her body across his thighs, was the dream of Sonda, his dream that had never had the chance to come true.

He was doing this to help, but he was also trying to escape. The truths he had seen over the past days were far too awful to bear. Perhaps he was fleeing to where Alishia already dwelled. He hoped that he would find his way back.

As the fledge began to take effect, Trey allowed his mind to wander. It strained at the edges of consciousness at first, still bound to his body as the drug filtered into his veins, a free spirit eager to move on and away. The fledge slowly dissolved the ties that bound him to flesh and bone and blood, and finally he peeled off, glancing back only once as he drifted away.

Alishia seemed to be watching him. Her eyes were wide and terrified, sparkling with minute movement, and her mouth was open in a wet scream she could not utter. He reached out and tried to touch her mind… and recoiled.

So tattered, so torn, so abused! Her mind was there, and she knew that he was there too, she knew because insight was all she had left. Her apparatus of consciousness had been slashed and shattered, the psychic bridges that were used to cross from pure spirituality to thought burned by something now absent. Trey pushed and sent comforting thoughts on ahead, trying to calm Alishia wherever she may have hidden away. Her mind was a deep, wide, expansive place, much more so than any he had seen before, and the light of her existence was like a candle in the great night sky; small, spluttering and all but invisible.

He pushed farther and crossed chasms. She saved me, he thought. He passed through gulfs that would have driven him mad, had he looked or extended his senses to feel them. She saved me.

And then he found Alishia, cowering behind the remnants of her own intellect.

Is it gone? Is it gone? Am I alone? Will it come back?

Alishia, it’s me.

Has it gone? It’s foul, it smells it hurts, has it gone? Will it come back?

Alishia, Rafe is a good person, he gave out no harm. He has magic in him, real magic!

Not him, it. It. Has it gone? Its hurts so much, it burns where it touched me and kills me, kills parts I never knew I had. Has it gone, Trey? Will it come back? Will it?

Alishia…

But he was losing her, she was dispersing and fleeing and hiding again, deeper down than he could ever go. She sounded like a little girl, afraid of the dark and being swallowed by it.

Trey pulled back, reigning in his senses until he was out of her mind and a mere observer again. He saw his own body slumped against the side of the cave, Alishia twitching on his lap, and at least now her eyes were closed.

Perhaps his presence had brought some measure of comfort.

Or maybe now she was dying.

Trey moved away quickly and passed by Rafe, resisting the temptation to reach out. He was terrified of what he would find in a mind such as his. The boy stared into the rain, stretching out his hand now and then to touch the curtain of water dripping down across the cave entrance, testing it, piercing it as if it were a shield between two realities.

Trey moved on, out of the cave and up into the crying sky. He felt an immediate sense of freedom as space grew around him, and as he spun and swooped way above the ground he pushed out his perception, comforted to find that there were no minds nearby. Not human, at least. Skull ravens sat chattering in trees farther up the slope, silenced by his touch. A herd of mountain goats munched wet grass. Nestled against a collapse of boulders far up the hillside, a tumbler quivered and shook in the rain, and Trey steered clear of its multiple captured minds. They were all screaming, and he had no desire to find out why.

He swept back toward Pavisse, passing through small valleys and over low hills, dipping into thickets of trees, finding a few dwellings where families huddled before the fire, hiding from the rain and dark. Some of these minds he touched on briefly, but he found nothing there to interest him. There was little to interest even themselves; they were sad, empty places, bereft of hope, concentrating instead on simple existence. None of them seemed to look farther forward than the next morning, when sheebok would need milking, fields hoeing and planting, ditches clearing, fences repairing…

He found the freedom exhilarating, and again he wondered just how far he could project himself like this. Underground there had been miles of solid rock to temper his explorations… but he also wondered whether his horizons had been too limited. He had never been tempted to move aboveground to see what it was like, even though perhaps the ability had always been there. As a miner he had often considered journeying topside at some point in his life. But as a fledge taker, he had never been tempted to take full advantage of the opportunities it offered him, other than guilty forays past Sonda’s bedroom window. His boundaries had been too insular, he knew that now. It had taken the disaster of the Nax to open his mind.

And then something appeared in the distance, something more powerful and less human. Trey dropped down near the ground, pulling in his exploratory senses and hiding himself as effectively as a raindrop in the storm. It would take some time for the thing to reach him, so he tasted the rain, felt it hitting the ground and splashing back up, loaded with dust. It was a summer storm, warm and welcome, but it carried taints of autumn, smells of dead leaves and bare trees. Things were changing, and even the rain swore to that.

The thing came closer, and Trey did not have to extend himself to know what it was: a Red Monk. He sensed it in the distance, saw it, heard it, felt its horse’s hooves shake the ground. It rode slouched in its saddle as if injured, but he thought it was probably trying to track, searching for footprints stamped in mud or hoofprints etched in the loam. Trey sank down into the ground, smothering himself in earth, hiding, feeling a slight tremble around him as the horse passed by not far away. He drew himself in, making his mind less than a point, nothing to see. The Monk did not pause. He had not been sensed.

He waited a few minutes before rising into the open once more. The rain was heavier than ever. He had to return to the cave. It was a good distance away, but the Monk would be there before daybreak.

Trey skirted south to make sure he did not pass too close to the Monk. Its mind had seemed foul, and he had no wish to approach touching it with his own. He skimmed low through a valley, into the lake at its base, shifting past fish and other things that swam in its depths, careful not to touch them. The water was black, and deep down it had begun to freeze. There were shapes struggling against the thickening water. Trey went deeper and sensed more things, large and small, frozen solid.

He surfaced and traveled back through the sky. At least there the rain smothered things that should not be.

“NOT FAR,” TREYsaid. “An hour, if it rides fast.”

“On our trail?” Kosar asked.

“Perhaps. It was tracking something.”

“We have to go.”

Trey had stood and wrapped Alishia in blankets, wiping tears from her cheeks. He remembered her voice, that sad voice lost in her own mind: Has it gone, Trey? Will it come back?

“I won’t let it come back,” he whispered, hoping that somewhere she heard his words and hoping they gave comfort.

“What was that?” Hope asked.

Trey glanced at the witch and shook his head, looking away. She frightened him.

Rafe suddenly appeared by his side, standing over him and Alishia. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Did you touch her mind?”

“Hardly. It’s been driven too deep. She’s barely herself anymore.” He glared at Rafe, blaming the farm boy and the magic he had wrought. It had terrified Alishia almost to death. This girl who had read so much and seen so little, exposed suddenly to such an event, driven mad

…

“Then who was she?” a voice said from back in the cave. Trey turned to see A’Meer sitting up, nursing her head with one hand and her elbow with the other.

“I don’t know,” Trey said, remembering more of his journey, more of what Alishia had been muttering in the deep parts of her mind. “But she’s afraid that something is going to come back.”

“What could that be?” Kosar said. “I don’t know anything of the girl. Is she normal?”

“She’s a librarian,” Trey said. “This is her first time outside Noreela City.”

“Trickery,” Hope said. “For some reason only the girl knows, she’s feigning this sleep. Has she stolen any of your fledge, miner? Is she guiding the Monks to us, even now?”

“No!” Trey said, fear of the witch fueling his anger. “She’s good. Something drove her from her own mind, and she’s terrified-”

“So why has it gone now?” A’Meer asked. Everyone turned to look at her. “And where? She’s only been like this since Rafe… since he touched me. We all felt what happened then, we all know what it was, but why would that drive the girl to distraction?”

Nobody could answer. The silence in the cave was loaded.

“Well, it scared the shit out of me,” Kosar eventually whispered.

“There was something inside her,” Trey said. “I saw the space it left, the scars on her mind. They were huge. ”

“Something left her mind when it saw magic,” Hope said, staring at Rafe. “The boy did just what he claimed he couldn’t, and something fled Alishia’s mind.”

“You sound like you blame me,” Rafe said.

“I blame you for never believing.”

“It’s the Mages,” A’Meer said.

Heads turned. Nobody spoke, and the rain provided the counterpoint to their disbelief.

“Perhaps they got wind of what was happening, knew somehow that magic was making a return. They have their spies in the land-they have ever since they left-gathering information, feeding back news, trying to ease their eviction with stories of how the land has been failing ever since. Maybe they heard that the Red Monks were on the move. They have access to things most people do not. Hope, they have your arcane knowledge, and much, much more.”

“But they fled northward, way past The Spine,” Kosar said. “It would take a couple of moons to travel that far.”

“As I said, Kosar, they have access to things. Trey, did you have to run across the land just now to report the Monk to us? No. Why would the Mages’ spies have to?”

“But what…?” Kosar said.

A’Meer sat up slowly, wincing as her bruised and battered body protested. “A shade,” she said. “They mastered controlling damaged shades during their reign. Who’s to say they don’t still have a certain influence?”

“But that’s magic,” Hope protested. “There is no magic!” She glanced at Rafe as she spoke, then looked away again.

“It doesn’t have to be magic. I received a message from you, remember?”

“That was a skull raven, that was just…”

“Communication,” A’Meer finished for her. “We don’t have to understand something for it to be possible. Don’t ascribe anything you don’t understand to magic.”

“But what of Alishia?” Trey asked. “What can we do for her?”

“I don’t know,” A’Meer said, shaking her head. “But we have to assume that the Mages will soon know what the thing in her head saw happen here. And as we all know, they’ll want what Rafe has for themselves.”

“Well, I don’t want it,” Rafe shouted. “They can have it, for all I care!”

“What about her?” Trey asked again. They were ignoring him. Dismissing her.

“It’s precious, Rafe!” Hope said.

“Who are you people?” Trey asked. Alishia trembled, mumbled something incoherent. “How are you going to help-”

“Who are you?” Hope asked. “A fledge miner who’s obviously never been topside before, and a strange woman who may have betrayed us to the Mages.”

“She didn’t betray us! It was what was inside her.”

“Maybe she’s always had it there,” Hope said. “She’s obviously not the person you thought she was.”

“She helped me!”

Hope looked down at Alishia where she lay prone on the cave floor. “Let her die.”

“You bitch!” Trey felt the drug still lifting him, trying to tear him away from this scene and carry him up and away, into freedom. But he fought that yearning, looked at Alishia, denying the shred of doubt that Hope’s words had planted in his mind.

“We don’t know who she is,” Hope said. “We don’t know who sent her, why, when, and what she’s going to do next. For that matter, we don’t know him, either!” She jabbed her finger at Trey and advanced toward him. He stepped back, frightened of the tattoos seemingly squirming on the witch’s face, bringing her skin alive.

“We have to leave, and soon,” A’Meer said tiredly. “We can talk about this when we’re away, but I’m in no state to take on another Monk.”

“And who are you?” Hope said, turning on the injured woman. “A Shantasi! And they’re about as trustworthy as my own turds! Who’s to say you aren’t here to steal what Rafe has for your slave-kin?”

“She fought a Red Monk so you could get away!” Kosar shouted.

“And beat it?” Hope threw her hands up. “Nobody beats a Red Monk! They let her win to deceive us. They’re probably closing in even now, ready to snuff out the only bit of hope this land has seen for centuries!” She stood at Rafe’s side with her back to him, arms spread, as if to ward off any attack from the others in the cave.

“No, Hope,” Rafe said. His voice was quiet, but it carried the authority of someone far older than he. “No fighting. No arguing. We don’t know one another, but we’re here for a reason.” He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and sighed, a long, heartrending exhalation. “You’re all here for me. And though I never wished it, there’s a part of me that asks that you protect me, as well as you can.”

RAFE HAD BEENlistening to the arguments: Hope’s paranoia, Trey’s concern for the fallen girl, Kosar the thief siding with the Shantasi warrior who had given them time to escape and almost died in the process.

I cured her, he thought. I touched her and drew out the poison from her blood, but through no physical process. The infected blood went nowhere. The poison simply stopped existing. I did that.

The rain pummeled down outside, and each impact was a whisper in his ears, more knowledge imparted and facts hacked down and burned; new, terrifying truths rising from the ashes. This simple cave, this depression in the land, was turning into a wonderful place in Rafe’s understanding. It was as if every crack in the wall, every raindrop, every blade of grass bending under a weight of water knew more than he had ever known. There was a power around him, buzzing to break out. It was terrifying but humbling; the power gave itself tentatively, holding back at every step, pleading with him, Be careful, be careful. He was terrified of its potential and awed by its intensity.

Now those people in the cave were looking at him, blinking in surprise at what he had said, each thinking themselves right in some small way. And in one way they were all right-magic was breathing again, and it was Rafe who gave it breath. But there was so much more they did not know.

“I’m weak,” Rafe said. “I’m eighteen next moon. And I’m a farm boy; I’ve no fighting experience. I’ve never had a fight other than with boys in the village. I’d have no idea how to defend myself against a Red Monk, intent on killing me for what’s started inside me.”

“And just what is that?” Kosar asked.

“Magic,” Rafe said. “Strong and powerful, but vulnerable as well. It’s inside me, gestating, and it relies on me to carry it. It’s readying it- and myself for what it will become.”

The cave was silent, its inhabitants awed. Even Alishia had stopped mumbling, as if she sensed the import of the moment.

“You cured me,” A’Meer said.

“I touched you and the magic bled into me. I just steered it. I think it was… an expression of good faith.”

“A bribe?” Hope asked.

“A gift,” Rafe replied. “It asks a lot, and in turn I ask a lot of you. Requests like that can’t exist without some reward.”

“So what do we all get?” Hope said. “What does the fledger get? What does the thief receive in payment for his allegiance?”

Rafe shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“It hasn’t told you yet?” Hope asked.

Rafe shrugged once again, saying nothing.

“What do I get?” Hope asked. “I’ve been waiting all my life, so what do I get?”

There was turmoil in Rafe’s mind, brief but violent, and the tang of the rain carried the warm scent of blood for less than a heartbeat. He closed his eyes but saw no less. “Hurt,” he said. “If you go against me, you get hurt.”

He could never have spoken those words… and yet he had. Those in the cave should have laughed at what he said, yet they did not.

He had convinced them. And the voices in his head sighed with contentment, and started to tell him more.

AS THEY LEFTthe cave Kosar knew that much had already changed. The rain pelted down and washed old dirt from his body, refreshing him, preparing him for the future. He opened his hands and held them palms-up, and although the wounds on his fingertips still stung, the pain was less than before. The torrent cleansed the dust and grit from his raw flesh, washing his past back into the ground. He hated foolish pride, but for the first time in years he had a purpose.

A’Meer sat on a horse, no longer tied into her saddle. She slumped in pain from her wounds, exhausted from the effects of the poison. But her eyes were bright now when she looked across at him, twinkling with excitement, and Kosar was thrilled that he and A’Meer were together. Somehow, any other situation would have seemed unthinkable. Perhaps this had always been their future.

Maybe they had been steered this way.

Kosar thrust that thought from his mind, stared it at the ground and let his horse trample it into the mud. He had no wish to imagine such a controlling influence over his life.

But A’Meer’s eyes said otherwise. Even though it was still dark he could see the way she looked at him, the sense of meaning suddenly exuding from her like a strong smell. He had never considered A’Meer aimless-she was too strong, too intelligent for that-but compared to this moment, she had always been adrift, he realized. Injured as she was, weak and vulnerable, the strength of her new conviction was evident. She had found her true course.

It was a frightening sensation, this sense of belonging. It scared Kosar to the core. And yet he could not deny that it felt good.

As they packed, they had talked about which way they should head. North, eventually, lay the Cantrass Plains, The Spine, Long Marrakash. It was rumored across the land that the Duke was there now, not exactly in hiding but living beneath a cloud of apathy and neglect. His people did not want or need him anymore-Noreela was becoming too fractured, too feudal-but his reign was still recognized by some of those in the north. Kosar suggested that they should make contact with the Duke and beg the protection of his army. Better a thousand fighting men than a witch, a thief, a fledge miner, a dying woman and an injured Shantasi. Hope had agreed, though grudgingly. Rafe had remained silent. He watched them talk about his safety. It was as if he had placed himself in their hands, and now it was their duty to do their best by him.

Also to the north, A’Meer had said, were the Mages. Fled for three centuries, maybe dead, or perhaps weakened or driven mad by exile. Much of their army had gone with them but it would be long-dead by now, skeletons in armor. And yet A’Meer insisted that the Mages would try something. They were so close to it for so long, she had said. They couldn’t help but be affected by the twisted magic they wrought. If they’re alive, they’ll want nothing but revenge.

They all knew of the Duke’s army and what it had become. Remnants lay scattered across the land in the Militia, local police forces that seemed quite efficient in small numbers but which in places such as Pavisse or Noreela City became perpetrators of crime rather than guardians against it. Control was good, but uninhibited power bred greed.

So for now they had agreed to head south. Hundreds of miles due south was Kang Kang, a place Kosar had once traveled close by but which he had no desire to visit again. An unknown place, a land of legend, Kang Kang was the birthplace of tales to scare children and adults alike. Much was said of its mountains and valleys, and if even a half of it was true, it was somewhere to avoid.

But Kosar did not think that Kang Kang was their aim. A’Meer had not commented upon this yet, but he could sense something in her, a new urgency fighting through her pain and tiredness. She had stated her mission to him quite plainly back in Pavisse, and demonstrated it by taking on the Red Monk: she was here to protect Rafe. She would gladly die doing so, but he was sure that she favored an alternative. She wanted to take him home. She wanted to travel to New Shanti.

HOPE WALKED CLOSEto Rafe’s horse. Her place was beside him, and she would not leave. She had been the first to find him, see his potential, sense the burgeoning power within, and now she thought of herself as his guardian. He had grown, even in the few days since she had found him curled up in a doorway in Pavisse, but the need to protect him remained. And she intended to be alongside him until the end, whatever the end might bring.

She felt proud of herself and her lineage. For generations her family had been witches, and now here she was, trudging through this filthy night with the source of new magic on a horse beside her. He looked asleep, but Hope guessed he was merely composing his thoughts, staring at his hands where they held his horse’s reins, looking inward not outward. Trying to see and understand the strange new landscapes within.

What she would give to be in there with him. What she would do to have just one single look.

She glanced back at the fledge miner and the comatose woman. He was steering the horse, glancing back constantly to make sure she had not slipped sideways in the saddle. It was one of the horses Hope had traded for at the farm, and even in the cool wet night it foamed at the mouth, snorted, straggled behind. It would be dead soon. Perhaps the girl would too.

Hope could find no trust in her heart for someone she did not know. It came from a lifetime of witchcraft. There were those who still feared a witch, but there were many more who knew for sure that she was a sham. Witches of old practiced magic, curving it to their whims and letting it re-form again, molding it like so much clay. Since the Cataclysmic War, a witch was merely a shadow of her ancestors, a pretender, wallowing in past glories or hiding beneath the veneer of legend. To some, frightening in her very madness. To others, pitiful. Hope was a witch and a whore combined, with double the reason to be hated.

Hope had always been a woman on her own-ironic that she had shared her bed with so many men-and now more than ever she felt withdrawn and introverted, longing to hide from the strangers she had been thrown in with. She had never met a fledge miner topside who could be trusted. They always ended up craving their fresh drug, swindling and lying and cheating in the vain hope that they could procure some more without returning underground. They knew so little of the lands they sought to live in, their knowledge confined instead to the caves, the darkness that hid millennia of memories. This knowledge combined with their own peculiar myths-born of the constant darkness, the tremendous pressure of the world surrounding them-to make them unreliable at best, and willfully devious at worst.

And then there was Kosar, a branded thief. He seemed strange. Though not as old as her, he was experienced and well traveled, yet almost naive in the company of herself and A’Meer. It was as if he shunned the knowledge that he must have been witness to over his years of wandering the lands, excluding it for want of a simpler life. His fingers bled, he tore strips of cloth to cover them and he hadn’t once asked whether Hope knew of ways to cure him. There were means-Willmott’s Nemesis, administered correctly, would ease his pain and let the wounds heal and close at last-and although Hope had none with her, it would be relatively easy to find. But if he did not ask, she would not offer. She liked him the way he was. Because although thievery was no reason for her to mistrust him, his relationship with the Shantasi was.

Hope’s trust was least for this Shantasi woman who knew so much. The witch liked to believe that it was not jealousy, though there was a glimmer of that: Hope had found Rafe, yet it was A’Meer who had fought and almost died for him. And it was the warrior woman who also seemed to know more about the Mages and their ways than any of them. That did not surprise Hope, but deep inside, in the animal part of her brain where reason gave way to instinct, it angered her. It drew her closer than ever to Rafe, and if in her head there was a crude sense of ownership, then so be it.

She knew little of the Shantasi. Some claimed to know them, to have an understanding of their origins and history, but these were almost always proved wrong. Hope had heard many wild rumors, the stuff of storytime, so exaggerated and unbelievable so as to be dismissed without a second thought. Other tales were frightened whispers from men in her bed-traders, farmers, militia and mercenaries-who claimed to have learned the secrets of the Shantasi. One man she remembered well had come close to tears as he related his tale to her, his claim that he had traveled almost as far as New Shanti but then been turned back, hounded out by wraiths and spirits too violent, too real to be dead. The chase had supposedly lasted for days, and however fast or slow he had been running, the spirits had always been just behind him, lashing out, not letting him rest for a minute until he entered the Mol’Steria Desert. There the chase had ended, but he had kept on running. He had run so far, he said, that the bones in his toes had begun to crumble, and he lifted his feet to show her.

Hope had smiled benignly, nodded. She knew of potions and suggestions that would imply a sense of pursuit in someone with a weak mind. It was a tale she had heard before.

But then the man had paused, stared at her, seeing her disbelief. He turned onto his stomach and showed her the wounds on his back. They were cauterized slashes, furrows in the skin from shoulders to buttocks, some deep, some barely a shading to the surface. The mark of the Shantasi spirits, he had said. He had remained lying there, and Hope had watched him sleep until daybreak.

A’Meer had too much Shantasi about her for Hope to trust her at all. She had appeared from nowhere, drawn to Rafe and his wakening gift, and without explanation she had sworn to protect him and guide him away from those who craved his destruction. Just because A’Meer and Hope both wanted Rafe protected did not mean that they were on the same side. Indeed, allegiances seemed fickle at best, there being so many aims and desires to be served. Perhaps she wanted the boy for her people. Slaves, many believed them to be, brought to Noreela thousands of years ago. Perhaps magic would serve their purposes of ultimate, long-desired revenge.

So Hope remained close to Rafe and his horse, patting the creature’s flank as if to communicate her friendliness. Soon, if things did not go to her liking, she might rely on this creature’s speed to help make their escape.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk