Dusk

Chapter 27

THEY DRIFTED THROUGHthe night. A sliver of the life moon and the glorious death moon shone down on the battered machine, both mocking. Stars speckled the sky and added their luminescence. The machine hummed quietly beneath them, shivering occasionally as if damaged or cold. They headed south. Perhaps there was purpose, but more likely it was simply drifting, an aimlessness brought on by sudden, unexpected, impossible defeat.

The Mages had Rafe. The Mages had magic.

Kosar lay back with his eyes closed, thinking of that first day when the Monk had ridden into their village. Back then he had had no idea of the greater workings of things, and even now he understood so little. Everything they thought they knew was supposition, any decisions they had made based upon uncertain thoughts and Rafe’s occasional, mostly unhelpful ideas. Really, he wondered how any of them had ever believed that they stood a chance at all.

A’Meer had been confident and passionate about her cause. Poor, dead A’Meer. Kosar had loved her-he’d always known that really-but it was strange how it took her death to reveal within him the true strength of that love. There was a hole inside, a blackness darker than this night, and it had little to do with Rafe’s capture.

“What now?” he said quietly. Neither Trey nor Hope answered him. Alishia had fallen back to sleep, though color had bled back into her cheeks now, and in the darkness she seemed to smile. They had checked her over after the attack. She was growing physically smaller, younger, regressing into some sort of unnatural childhood, though none of them questioned how far this would go. Just more strangeness to live with. And in truth, only Trey really cared.

More time passed, and the machine bore them ever southward. They would reach Kang Kang soon, Kosar knew, but that did not concern him. He had been there before, and it would be no more dangerous than anywhere else now that the Mages had returned.

Myth, legend, stories to tell children by the camp light, old tales carved onto story-walls in the bigger towns and cities… and terrifying though the stories were, they were always safely harbored in history, cosseted away, buried as surely as the million that had died in that Cataclysmic War so long ago.

Myths were not supposed to return. Legends were never meant to come back to life.

Hope cried quietly in the night, her tears forming strange shapes on her tattoos, but Kosar felt in no mood to comfort her.

Trey sat next to Alishia, staring down at her but seeing something else entirely. Kosar could sense the pain and loss in the miner’s yellowed eyes.

Kosar stood slowly and walked to the edge of the machine, stretching up to look over the membrane between ribs, wondering whether anything had already begun down below.

The land was lost. The Mages had the fledgling magic in their hands, and whatever they did to Rafe to gain control of it-and that didn’t bear thinking about, not at all-it surely would not take long. Perhaps down was up already, and black was white, and life could easily swap places with death. With three centuries to plot their return, the Mages must surely know how revenge would be most effectively wrought.

“What now?” Kosar said again.

“Now Noreela ends,” Trey said. “Everything that happened no longer matters. I almost envy my family and friends, dead down there from the Nax. At least they died at home. And here I am, a miner, flying toward my death high above the surface I never should have seen.”

“This can’t be it,” Kosar said, but he knew the childlike naivete of his words. “Hopeless,” he muttered.

“There’s something about her,” Hope said.

Kosar turned and saw the witch standing above Alishia. Her face was stern, molded by sorrow and anger. “What do you mean?”

“I mean apart from the obvious, the fact that she’s a girl instead of a woman now. However impossible that is, there’s something else. She’s not as ill as she was. She’s looking better. Less asleep. And for a while down there… just for a while… she was awake.”

“Meaning what?” Trey asked. He leaned in close across Alishia as if to protect her from the witch.

Hope stepped back. “We’re going somewhere,” she said. “Have neither of you thought of what’s happening here? The machine is still flying. Magic is still guiding us. Thief, you saw the machines in the valley falling still as soon as we left, their use ended. This flying machine… magic must know that it still has its use.”

“I don’t care,” Trey said. “We couldn’t keep the boy from the Mages, and the four of us will never get him back. That’s for certain.”

Hope looked at Kosar and smiled, shrugged. The expression did not sit well on her face and he turned away, perturbed. Was that hope he had seen there? Greed? Rage? He could not tell. Her tattoos had hidden her true feelings, as always, and she was as much an enigma to him now as ever.

“No matter,” Hope said. “Time will tell. We’ll be in Kang Kang soon.”

Their conversation ended there, and each of them withdrew into their own thoughts. Kosar sat back against a rib and nursed his wounded hand and bleeding fingers. He licked the blood from his fingertips, bearing the brief pain before the soothing sensation overcame them, just for a time. A’Meer had been able to soothe that pain. Sweet, mysterious A’Meer.

He drifted to sleep reliving images from the past, but time treated them differently. He fought the Monk in the village instead of hiding away. He refused to help A’Meer and fled north to the Cantrass Plains. Rafe drowned crossing the San, their journey ended by the wretched faults in nature, not by those that had caused those faults in the first place. And each dream fed into the next with the same sense of incompletion.

WHEN KOSAR WOKEup it was still dark. He saw Trey and Hope standing at the far edge of the machine, staring out through the tattered hole in the ribs.

“How long have I been asleep?” he said. “Feels like hours.”

“It was,” Trey said. “Ten, eleven hours.”

“It should be dawn.” Kosar looked out through the ribs and saw the dark ridges of Kang Kang to the south, their pinnacles biting at the moonlit sky. Then east, out toward New Shanti, where the sun was not.

“It should be,” Hope said, “but it isn’t. No sun today, Kosar. There’ll be no sun today.”

He shook his head, not understanding. Above the eastern horizon there was only a sad smudge, like the memory of life reflected in a pale corpse’s eyes. The rest of the sky was the same sickly hue, redolent of the death moon at its brightest. Kosar held up his hand-he could see the shape, but no real color. He could feel the moonlight on his skin, but there was no warmth.

“I don’t understand.”

“The Mages have made their first move,” Hope said. “What are we, any of us, without daylight?”

THE MACHINE, BORNEby magic, drifted south, edging closer to the peaks of darkest Kang Kang. While Kosar, Hope and Trey watched for a dawn that would not arrive, Alishia slept behind them.

And she dreamed.

Such dark, fearsome dreams.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk