Dusk

Chapter 4

RAFE’S ONLY SENSEwas touch. He could feel the hands holding him down, the water sluicing his body, the rough scouring of something scraping across his stomach, his chest, then down between his legs. He struggled, but to no avail. He tried to open his eyes, thought he’d succeeded, but he saw only black. Either he was in total darkness or he was blind. He could not smell anything, and although the water trickled into his open mouth, there was no taste.

He was panicking, but it seemed at a distance, a remote fear for the well-being of someone he knew only vaguely. It was a sensation he had felt before. When he was young he stole a bottle of rotwine from Trengborne’s shop and sloped out into the fields with his friends. He felt big and brave, but within an hour of the first gulp he wished he had never even heard of the drink. He had often wondered why those men and women sitting inside and outside the tavern looked so lifeless, so devoid of emotion, and now he had found out. Everything receded until there was only fire in his veins, blurring the edges of his senses.

His father had found him and dragged him back to the house, sat up with him all night until Rafe came to and vomited across the floor. His parents did not tell him off. They said he had scolded himself, and that they hoped he had learned a lesson.

His parents. They were kind and thoughtful, not impulsive and cruel like so many people he knew. They were also open and honest, and he loved them for that. Most people would have chosen never to tell their son that he was not truly their flesh and blood; that they had found him out on the hillside, a babe abandoned by rovers or a family too poor to care for another child; that though both as barren as some of the village fields, they had been so desperate to have a child that they had taken him and called him their own. Such honesty had troubled him at first, but in time it had made him love them even more. The trust implicit in their telling of the truth revealed the depth of their feelings for him.

And now they were dead.

“Dead!” he shouted, but hands pushed him back down as he tried to sit up, and he realized they were trying to help. The washing had stopped and now he was being dried with a rough towel, the cuts on his legs and arms stinging as clumsy but caring hands scoured them.

Rafe sat up again, pushing at whomever held him down. He touched his face to see if his eyes were open-they were-and the confirmation helped his vision creep back. With it came sound, and smell. He looked around, sniffed and began to wish he was still unconscious.

The room could have been a slaughterhouse, or a refuse tip, or perhaps it had been used to house corpses during the Great Plagues and someone had forgotten to take them away. The stink of rotting meat was tremendous: a heavy, warm, sweet smell that twisted Rafe’s guts into agonized knots and brought saliva to his mouth. He hated himself for feeling hungry. He looked around to try to find the cause of the stink, but he saw only the huge man who had been tending him. Perhaps, he thought, this person was the source of the smell. It seemed all too likely, judging by his appearance. Over six feet tall, all of it scruffy and filthy, a beard that housed tiny crawling things and arms so hairy that they looked like furbats attached to his shoulders. The man’s face was scarred down one side, old whip-wounds black as death. Rafe recognized the signs of a tumbler attack from the stories he had heard back in Trengborne.

“Boy?” the man said, and it was as if the ground had spoken. His voice sounded like rocks grating together.

Rafe raised his eyebrows, too shocked to answer.

“Boy,” the man said again, smiling slightly. The smile tempered the voice and made it kind.

And then Rafe looked into his eyes for the first time, and he saw a cool, calm intelligence there, something belying his appearance. Rafe knew those eyes, recognized that intellect.

“Uncle Vance?”

“Rafe,” the huge man grumbled, “my boy, I haven’t seen you for so long. What in Black’s been happening? Why’re you all bloody and cut up?”

“Uncle, they’re dead,” he said. Actually saying it seemed to make it all final and real, and the dregs of unconsciousness flitted away to the corners of the stinking room. “All of them. Mother… Father

… everyone.”

“Royston? Dead?”

“Dead,” Rafe said again, and began to cry. He tried not to blink because every time he shut his eyes, images of his slaughtered parents came to him. But keeping his eyes open made him cry more.

Vance, his expression one of stunned shock, came to him and held out his arms, touching Rafe’s lips with something cool and rank. “Best sleep, then,” he said, and before Rafe could reply, sight, taste and sound faded out once more. The final sensation was his uncle’s hand on his brow, shaking slightly as the big man shed his own shameless tears.

“HE RODE INTOthe village,” Rafe said. “Then he killed everyone. And there was nothing anyone could do. The militia fought him, but he killed them. He had arrows in him and bolts and everything, but still he walked and killed. I watched him from the hills when I escaped.. . I watched him die, I think… but then I was followed. I think he’s following me.”

“A madman. There are many of them nowadays.”

“But why kill Mother and Father? There’s no rhyme, no reason.”

“People don’t need reasons,” Vance said. “They just need the urge.” He stared off into the corners of the room for a time, though Rafe was sure he was seeing much farther. “Royston,” he muttered, and shook his head.

“How did I get here?” Rafe asked through their shared pain. “I don’t remember. I know I came down from the hills, there was something following me, but I don’t know how I found my way here.”

Vance looked up. “There was someone following you, but it was no madman. He brought you here after you collapsed in the street.”

“Who?”

“Some thief.”

Rafe shook his head, frowning.

Vance grunted. “He knew where I was, somehow. Said he’d been here before. Said he’d been most places.” He hawked, and spat a huge gob of mucus onto the floor. “All the damn trouble there is in the world, and you get mixed up with a thief.”

“I wasn’t mixed up-”

“I know, I know. That’s not really what I meant.”

Rafe watched his uncle move across the room and open a cupboard. He brought out a bottle and uncorked it, slurping noisily as he downed half of its contents in one swallow.

“Aren’t you going to tell anyone?” Rafe asked.

“Huh?” Vance’s eyes were glazing.

“We have to tell someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I have to go back, bury Mother and Father, do something… do something for-”

“They’d have been taken by now, by things. Night things. And Rafe, there’s no one to tell. I could ride five days to Noreela City, and if the wraiths or tumblers or bandits didn’t get me first, and if they even let me through the city gates, they’d ask me why I’d come. Then they’d laugh and send me away again. Trengborne is an unknown little village in a big bad world. Nobody would give a Mage shit about what’s happened.”

“But everyone’s dead!”

Vance stared, and Rafe felt himself shriveling beneath that gaze. It held knowledge of all manner of things, and most of them must surely be bad. “Two moons ago, so it’s said, a village two days to the east-two days nearer Noreela City, mind you-was swallowed up. Sucked into the ground by a sinkhole. Everything mixed and blended into a soup. A thousand people. And you know what they sent from the city? Nothing. No help, no militia, not even a Mourner.” He looked at the ceiling, took another swig from the bottle and belched. “Everyone dies. It’s just that these days, people are doing it more often.” He drained the bottle and smashed it into a corner. “Nobody cares anymore.”

Vance found a fresh drink and virtually dismissed the terrified boy. In minutes he was drunk and dribbling, and a long hour later he was asleep.

Grief threatened to overwhelm Rafe, but anger held it at bay, or at least kept it contained. Perhaps shock was still shielding him from the reality of the moment, deadening what had happened. He shed more tears, held his head in his hands and tried to remember all the good times.

LATER, RAFE LEFTthe room and found his way out from the mazelike building. People were lying in hallways, asleep or dead. Rats rooted around and under them, crocodile beetles sought moist holes, and the slew of protection charms drawn on the walls in faded blood displayed a desperate, superstitious hope in a magic faded into myth. Rafe was not used to seeing such signs and they stirred something unknown within him, a memory that had never happened. He traced one sigil with his finger, and the dried, crusted blood scratched his skin.

The stink of his uncle’s room seemed to have percolated throughout the whole building. Either that, or every room stank.

Rafe wondered who the thief could be. There was Kosar, the worker in Trengborne, but they had never even spoken to each other. And surely he would have been killed along with everyone else.

He found his way out of the building. Weak sunlight greeted him and, though they were frightening and strange, he introduced himself to the afternoon streets of Pavisse.

HE HAD HEARDmuch about the town. Some of it was hearsay, rumor passed through the young community of Trengborne and propagated by their desires of what the big town could offer. Some was from his parents, usually accompanied by warnings never to go there. It was a useless place, they had said, marked only by crime and badness, in dire need of rescue. Rescue from what, they had never expanded upon, and neither had they explained their stern words of caution.

Rafe felt as if he was betraying his parents by even wandering the streets, but venting his grief in the presence of his drunken, frightening uncle felt worse. And it was such a strange and shocking place that curiosity got the better of him. Somewhere, perhaps that vague idea of help still existed… but it was a nebulous concept now, as distant as he felt.

Pavisse was a mining town first and foremost, and most of its inhabitants had something to do with working the ground. Groups of miners strode along the street, proudly wearing the unavoidable badges of their trade. Coal miners had leathery black skin and broad shoulders. They also bore scars and injuries from the many accidents and cave-ins underground: missing limbs; empty eye sockets; faces cleansed of anything approaching joy. Those who dug fledge had eyes yellowed from their constant proximity to the drug, and bald scalps, a side-effect of its use. They were tall and thin, willowy men and women who twisted and turned their way through the many fledge arteries that networked the underground. They stared at something far away-memories of better lives, perhaps-and to Rafe they looked like ghosts seeking somewhere to lie down in peace.

The miners had something else that set them apart, and it did not take long for Rafe to realize what it was. Three fledgers shoved him aside, walked on without giving him a second glance, and he knew then what he was seeing: total disregard for anyone other than fellow miners. Not just ignorance or aloofness; they could have been a different species.

Before long, Rafe became completely overawed by what he was seeing. In Trengborne, a simple farming village where the folks worked to live, and lived simply, there was little out of the ordinary. Rafe had seen a raid by tumblers when he was very young-he remembered them congregating around a fallen child, playing with him, toying with their prey before one of them rolled forward and pierced him with its barbs-and sometimes, in dreams, he thought he remembered a wraith. But other than that, nothing extreme. Here, the sights saturated his senses very quickly. Rafe’s simple perception of things was soon drowned out by the excesses of Pavisse.

A man was lying in the road being kicked by three coal miners, their boots impacting with his head and stomach and groin, and yet all who passed averted their eyes. The victim looked like fodder-dregs of an ancient race once bred for food in Long Marrakash-and although Rafe had never before seen one of these sad creatures, he hid his fascination and walked on. Elsewhere, a naked woman sat in a rocking chair in a doorway with her legs wide open, beckoning men to sample her wares. One fledger stopped, did his business there and then, paid her and walked away. The woman put on her stock alluring smile once more, scanning the street, eyes glazed with bad wine and skin grayed by years of rhellim use. The display was horrific and sickening, and Rafe thought of the many rumors he’d heard from the young men in Trengborne. Naked women in the streets, they had said. It had sounded dreamlike. In reality, it was a nightmare.

He passed through a narrow byway and emerged into a huge square bounded on all sides by buildings four stories tall, all of them seemingly overflowing with people waving long scraps of colored cloth. They were relatively silent, although the strange sounds of grunting, feet scraping on stone and heavy breathing seemed to give a secretive whisper to the crowd. Every now and then the impact of wood upon stone or something softer inspired a groan. Rafe stood back for some time, unable to see past the knot of people standing before him. He stared up at the windows and balconies, trying to make out from their expressions what these people were watching. On a few faces he saw vague disinterest; on a few others, outright fascination; but generally they seemed excited and enraged at the same time. He’d seen similar expressions on the faces of the rhellim-fueled whores back in Trengborne, desperate for business but sometimes, when the militia were away, ignored and looked down upon.

He pushed his way through the crowd.

They had a tumbler in there. It was a big one, obviously well fed in this gladiatorial ring. The wooden pen had walls twice the height of a fledger, curved inward at the top, spiked with barbed metal prongs to prevent the tumbler from rolling out. Rafe had once heard that they reacted to sound, zoning in on playing children or couples courting in the long mountain grass. That explained the silent spectators.

There was a man in the enclosure with the tumbler. He was not really there to fight, but to stay alive. How long he could do so, and the inevitability of his eventual demise, was obviously the entertainment for this crowd.

The tumbler left an intermittent bloody track across the cleaned stone square as it rolled. Crushed into its plantlike hide was a second man, dead, pierced by the thing’s many natural spikes and hooks. One arm flipped free as the tumbler rolled, thumping the stone in a rhythm that gave that silent place a grotesque heartbeat.

Rafe turned and pushed his way back through the crowd, ignoring the hostile stares and vague threats of violence. He tried to find his way back to his uncle’s home, but the streets conspired to keep him to themselves, confusing him with corners where he was sure there had been none before, new buildings, strange views, hidden courtyards. The farther he went the more lost he became, and each way felt wrong. He looked for Uncle Vance just in case the big man had come out to search for him, but every face he saw was a stranger, and none of these strangers had any interest in him. In the end he curled up in a shadowy doorway and closed his eyes, shaking with fear, preferring to sink down into sleep peopled with calming memories of his parents than subject himself to more of what this place had to offer.

His poor, dead parents. How right they had been: Pavisse was fit only for madmen and wraiths. Eyes closed, Rafe tried to remember his way back to Trengborne, back to before things had gone so insanely wrong. But even though in his mind’s eye he was there, everything was dark. He felt as though he were in a warm cave where the air was heavy and wet, and safety thrummed like his mother’s heartbeat.

Someone touched his arm. Rafe opened his eyes. He groaned out loud.

The woman was short and stocky, and of some indefinable age. She had wild hair that formed a filthy halo around her head, strands twisted and pointing away from her skull in all directions as if seeking escape. Her eyes were a dark green, their whites speckled with the flush of broken veins. Her face was scored with swirling tattoos that started at the corners of her eyes, spiraled and multiplied across her cheeks-there were patterns there that he thought he should know-until their branches conjoined again to enter her mouth at both corners. Rafe was sure they continued inside, just as he was certain that those eyes saw everything.

It was the first time he had ever seen a witch.

“So what’s a nice boy like you doing in Pavisse?” she asked.

“You should know.”

“Me? Why me?” She shrugged and looked almost offended, but her green eyes were glinting with humor.

“I know a witch when I see one,” Rafe said, “and witches know everything.” He was trying to appear brave and knowledgeable, but he sounded like a child. Tears threatened and he swallowed them back. They burned.

The woman looked him up and down, licking her lips.

They eat people, Rafe remembered one of his friends saying, fear and fascination distorting his voice.

“Actually, I’m a lady,” the woman said, “and I don’t quite know everything. Almost, but not quite.” She smiled, reached out quickly and grabbed Rafe’s cock through his thick trousers, squeezing and twisting it slightly. “Never been dipped, that one. I can tell.”

Rafe pushed her away and drew his legs up, trying to force himself back into the solid wooden door behind him. “Leave me alone!” he cried, sounding more frightened than ever.

The woman leaned back and laughed, stopped suddenly, then looked back down at Rafe. She staggered back two steps, her eyes so wide open that Rafe was sure they would tumble onto her cheeks. “Oh my sweet old heart!” she gasped.

This frightened Rafe more than having the old woman grab him. At least then he’d known what she was doing-touting for trade-whereas now, her sudden fearful reaction was even more disturbing. He scared her, that much was plain. Her mouth had dropped and the tattoos elongated across her cheeks, like extra screams to complement the one that seemed to be building within her.

“What?” Rafe asked, feeling a confidence building from nowhere. A group of fledgers passed by, their dull yellow eyes skitting across the scene as if he and this woman had always been here. From elsewhere a roar suddenly rose from the maze of buildings, alleys and courtyards, and he wondered whether the man had killed the tumbler, after all.

“Come with me!” the witch said, her voice shaking. She stepped forward as if to grab him again, but paused with her hand hovering inches from his shoulder. Her voice lowered. “Please. Come with me. I can hide you. I can help you.”

“I don’t need your help! Leave me alone, witch. Got a prong in your palm? I know that’s how you do it, stick me and poison me-”

“That’s for charlatans and those that betray the name,” she hissed. “I fear you, but don’t put me down for what I have to do. I am what I say, and I do what I do to survive. We all know there’s no magic in anything now, don’t we?” She stared at him for a few seconds, unmoving, seeming not to breathe as she awaited whatever answer he would give.

“So why help me? I have nothing. You can’t screw me for tellans.”

“Such language!” the old witch said, and for a brief instant Rafe heard his mother in her tone.

“Fuck,” he said, and started to cry.

“Come with me,” the witch said again, on the verge of panic now. She looked over her shoulder at a pair of coal miners who were loitering across the street. Rafe followed her gaze, wondering what they wanted, sure that they had not even noticed him and the witch. A horse clipped up the dusty road, slow and tired, and the man sitting astride it was hooded and slumped in the saddle.

Him, him! Rafe thought, but this man’s robe was black, not red, and Rafe could see his face, the heavy gray beard that hung down over his chest and stomach.

The witch froze, seeming to sense Rafe’s brief flush of fear.

“You’ve already seen a Red Monk?” she asked.

Rafe frowned, wincing at the sudden sharp memory. “The man wore red…”

“With me,” she said. “Quickly now!”

“I have to find my uncle.”

“We can do that later; right now you have to get off the street. Now! If you’ve seen one Monk and survived, there’ll be more yet. Though how you survived…?”

She was suddenly not threatening at all. Rafe had been scared of her at first-those tattoos, her grabbing his cock, the simple fact that someone in this sprawling, ugly town had noticed him-but now he heard his mother’s tone in her worried words, sensed a level of concern outweighing any intent to hurt or abuse.

In a way, it felt as if she knew him.

“How do you know me?”

“I don’t. But I know what you’ll know and what you’ll seek. I’m honored, boy, and amazed, and I think perhaps I’m only dreaming here. But for now no more, eh? Let’s keep our lips sealed and our minds our own. Get off the street, get hidden, that’s the priority for you right now. Follow me, keep quiet, and in a few minutes we’ll be safe and we can talk. And listen. Only I guess I’ll be doing the listening. I have been for all these years, watching and listening…”

“I don’t-”

“Understand. Yes. Boy, what’s your name?”

“Rafe Baburn.”

“Pleased to meet you, Rafe. I’m a witch, as you rightly said, and a whore in with it too. My name’s Hope. There’s irony in that, because it’s the name I took for myself years before I knew that’s what I’d spend my life doing: hoping. Praying to the Black and the sleeping gods and the bloody shitting Mages if I had to that… well, we should go.”

Rafe did not understand the witch’s ramblings and he thought that perhaps she’d lost her mind. She showed no signs of rhellim usage, none of the side effects of fledge, and her breath smelled of old cabbage and bad meat, not alcohol. But she talked nonsense. A strange nonsense. A nonsense directed at him and about him. He missed his mother. He missed his father. And now this woman, this witch-whore called Hope, wanted to take him home.

“I’m very hungry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten since… since I saw my parents killed.”

The sympathy that filled her eyes could not be faked. “Oh Rafe,” she said. “Come with me. Then we can talk.”

Hope grabbed Rafe’s hand and pulled him quickly into the mouth of a narrow alley. And they entered another world.

IT WAS Acity within the city. Rafe smelled it before seeing anything, wafts and hints of what was about to be revealed drawing them through the alley; the strong, mysterious tang he had sensed up on the hillside, and the vague aroma of old alcohol that he knew from Trengborne. But there were other smells here too, rich aromas that seemed to emanate from the moss-covered walls of the alleyway, strong and weak, sickly and dry, inviting and disgusting. He breathed in deeply and gagged on the stink of shit, and his next breath caused a stirring in his loins as rhellim fumes stroked his mind. Contradictions and confusions accompanied him as he followed Hope away from the bustle of the Pavisse he could just understand and into the hidden city he could not.

They turned the final corner of the alley. He should have expected something like this, he supposed. No varied raft of smells like that would come from a few vagrants sleeping rough beneath the skins of stolen furbats. But it still came as a shock when he saw the hundreds of people, the alley widening into a street, the chaos of a town that seemed so different from the one he had just left. Back there Pavisse was a rough place built well, a once-proud town turned sour after the Cataclysmic War had robbed it of magic. Here… it was newer, Rafe knew, but a place such as this did not thrive on hope. It lived off bitterness and crime, desperation and hate. It had been formed after the Cataclysmic War and was a product of it.

The street curved into the distance, passing beyond view maybe five hundred steps away. Some of the buildings may have been the rear facades of those he had just passed in Pavisse’s main street, but back here they were deformed, half-collapsed, mutated by the additions and changes wrought by their strange inhabitants. A heavy machine formed part of one building, its use long since forgotten but its exposed innards curving up toward the sun, making room for a few tall, thin fledgers to lie back and chew their drug. The machine was rusted where it was metal, smoothed by time where it was stone, and there were bones too, the flesh of its biological parts long since rotted away and added back to the ground. The building had seemingly grown around it, and Rafe wondered what had been here first: machine or construction. Perhaps one had been to support the other, although Rafe could not now guess at which way this could have worked.

There were more machines, small and large, a few with obvious uses-those that had moved as transport, others that had probably once ploughed and planted in the fields-but most with purposes lost in the turbulent mists of time. They were all incorporated in some way, chopped and changed and altered as if those that had used them were frustrated at their lack of animation. The channels were there within these machines, the empty reservoirs and sacs and current routes that had given them the strange life they once lived, but they were dead. Dead as the sand beneath the dwellers’ feet, dead as the air they exhaled, dead as the corpses Rafe saw in the gutter in one or two places. There was a fledger, his or her body twisted and ripped from whatever had killed it. There was also something else, something that must once have been fodder because of its size, exposed ribs torn back and knotted by the accelerated growth, slabs of flesh and muscle ripped from its wet corpse. As he watched, disgusted and terrified, a small lizard darted from a rent beneath one of the larger machines, buried its nose in the fodder and darted away again, dinner in its mouth.

The fodder shifted, turning its misshapen head and uttering a low, wretched groan.

“Mage shit!” Rafe exclaimed.

“Leave it be,” Hope said, walking by without giving the pitiful thing a second glance.

Help, it hissed. Rafe looked down, but the fodder was not looking at him. Perhaps the sound of its plea had simply been air escaping its slashed neck.

“Leave it be!” Hope said again. She’d turned back to him now, conveying the same message within her stare. Rafe glanced around. A few people were watching him. A female fledger, bald, eyes yellow as a rancid wound, beckoned him over with one impossibly long finger. She was naked, and hung from a twist of metal and stone with one hand. Her body was speckled with soft black spots. It looked as if she were rotting from the inside.

“Fun, stranger?” she said. Her voice was strangely quiet, high, musical. Almost hypnotic. “Fun with me, stranger?”

“Not with you, no!” Hope said.

The fledger hissed and dropped from her perch, landing on the street wide-legged and crouched into a fighting stance.

“Paid you already, has he?” she hissed.

“He’s with me, yes,” Hope said. Rafe glanced sideways and saw that she had one hand inside her jacket. Furbat, he noticed, picking out a crazy detail in this loaded moment. Furbat jacket, so old that the leather was denuded of all fur, shiny with age, darkened with sweat and rain and who knew what else. This jacket had seen its fair share of years and places. How much of this had been upon Hope’s shoulders, and how much on other peoples’?

The fledger hopped a few steps closer like a jumping spider. Rafe could smell her. Rank, rotten and sad.

“Fledge, young one, stranger, a bit of fledge with my legs around your face, you’ve never eaten so well!” She thrust her groin forward and displayed the hairless crack there, like a jagged slit in the earth.

Rafe could not help looking down. There were speckles of fledge across her pale yellow thighs, a mustardy trace that hinted at more drug within.

“I won’t warn you again,” Hope said. Something in her voice brought a moment of silence, a period of nervous calm. But there were others watching now-fledgers, coal miners, people who simply had nothing else to do-and the fledger did not wish to lose face.

“Screw you, witch!” she said.

Hope brought her hand out from her pocket. Even before she opened her fist Rafe saw the fledger’s eyes widen with fear. The others backed away as well, suddenly having more urgent things to attend to. There was real terror here, Rafe saw, a rich reverence the fledger must have held for Hope from the first moment. But the confrontation was all about face and respect, and once begun, her pitch had to be carried through, one way or another.

Hope held a handful of spiders. One was green, another bright orange, the third black. All of them were fat and fast. She lobbed them at the fledger and muttered something under her breath, and then she walked quickly away.

The fledger leapt onto the uneven wall and pulled herself up, grasping at uncertain handholds and rusted projections before she disappeared up and over onto the rooftop, moving like the spiders she fled. The orange arachnid followed her up, while the other two went in opposite directions along the base of the building as if to outflank her.

The fledger screamed all the way.

“What was that?” Rafe asked quietly. They were walking quickly now, the screams of the fleeing fledger echoing from above. A small smile perked the corners of Hope’s mouth. “Those spiders, Hope. What were they? They were following her.”

“Of course they weren’t,” Hope said. “They were only wood spiders. I colored them myself. I always carry a couple in a skin-sac in my pocket, just in case. Often come in handy.”

“But why…? What do they know? The fledgers, the people?”

“They know that I’m a witch. That’s enough. I’m a witch, I throw spiders at them, they’re going to run.”

“No spells? No magic?”

Hope paused and glanced back along the street. Like a stone thrown into a pond, the ripples of their passing had already settled back to nothing. The street’s life had returned to normal, and if she was still screaming, the fledger was now far too distant to hear.

“No spells,” Hope said. “No magic. Because magic has gone. You know that as much as anyone.” She stared into his eyes. “Maybe more.”

“But… I thought witches…”

Hope smiled sadly and shook her head. “Not even witches, farmer boy.” The tattoos on her skin seemed to stretch to make her smile more solid. And even though her comment sounded dismissive, Rafe heard more respect in her voice than he’d heard for a long, long time. Respect, and perhaps fear.

They continued through the streets, the warrenlike maze of alleys and roads and courtyards, all of them that much wilder than the greater part of Pavisse, that much more downtrodden. Yet the life here seemed faster and more intense, as if this part of the city was reveling in the fact that it was hidden within the greater whole. There was drinking and fighting and fucking in the streets. Bodies too, victims of drunken brawls or robbery or dark, seedy revenge. A couple of the dead were covered with ragged blankets as if to hide their wounds from sight, but each corpse was being slowly eaten. Rats, lizards, wild dogs, carrion snakes as wide as Rafe’s arm and four times as long, all of them emerging from beneath the buildings or out of the ground, snatching their fill and then disappearing again. Rafe wondered what must exist beneath the streets to give birth to such a variety of wildlife, all of it fattened on carrion. He paused, kicked away sand and stones from around his feet until he found solid ground beneath.

Words stared back up at him, a language far away in time or place. Symbols and letters combined, all of them mysterious, and none of them for him. He imagined these words spoken as the strange whispers he had heard in his head, and the idea seemed to fit.

“Hope,” he said. She paused and turned. “What’s this?”

She glanced down at his feet and kicked sand back across the carved stone. “History,” she said, turning away again.

More to ask later, Rafe thought. There were more things to life than he could have imagined, more than his parents had ever told him, and he felt small and alone in this place. All eyes seemed to be staring at him, and back here in the streets behind streets they mostly belonged to people he had no desire to mix with. Fledgers stared with yellow eyes, coal miners shoved him aside without even noticing, other people mingled and argued and occasionally fought. And the buildings themselves were equally as threatening. One tall stone block, drilled with toothed windows, was spiked with long obsidian prongs, thrusting out into the street and up at the sliver of sky. Parts of an unknown machine maybe, or more likely adornments, a few of the spikes held sticky remnants. Black birds darted down and alighted on the spikes, picking at the mess, screeching as they took off again and flew straight back up. Even they seemed afraid to land for too long.

Hope turned right into a narrow, uneven doorway, and glanced back at Rafe. “We have to go in here,” she said, nodding with her head. “I’ve been through here before. It’s safe.”

Rafe looked into the doorway. The entire inside of this building was a machine, vast and old. Hope was hunching down and entering a veined hole that looked like a giant’s intestine, hollowed out by time, contents gone away to dust. Rafe stepped forward and watched her worm her way in, and he caught a brief but potent whiff of old dry rot. He stepped back again and bumped into someone, receiving an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. The face of the building bulged out above him. The machine-whatever it was, whatever strange task it had been built to perform-hung over him as if ready to tumble at any moment. Its outside was ridged and bumped with projections weathered smooth over the decades, metal edges rusted, stone creases worn.

“Come on,” Hope said. “It’s not far.” And then she crawled into shadow.

Rafe followed. It was that or remain where he was, lost, so far from his uncle Vance that he would surely never find his way back.

They passed through the machine. It was dark and heavy. Rafe felt the thing pressing down at him, like a huge presence paused with its foot held ready to stomp.

On the other side there was another, narrower street, the faces of buildings so close that Rafe could almost stretch out both arms and touch them. People shoved by to and fro, some of them eyeing him suspiciously, others ignoring him. He could see addiction in their eyes: alcohol; fledge; rhellim. And there were other forms of abuse going on here of which Rafe had no knowledge. One man held a fleshy bag in front of his mouth, breathing in and out quickly as his eyes rolled up in his skull and his face seemed to darken. A woman sat cross-legged in a window above the street, sighing as a swarm of insects drew blood from self-inflicted gashes across her shoulders and neck. He had never imagined any of this. He was a farm boy, just like Hope had said, and the more he saw the more nervous he became.

“Hope,” he said, and the witch turned to look at him. She must have seen the panic in his eyes because she put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. Her tattoos smiled with her, and Rafe felt calmer.

“We’re nearly there,” Hope said. “My place. We can sit and eat and talk. I want to know what happened to you, and I think… I think I may have some things to tell you.”

“About what?”

“About why you’re here.”

“My parents were killed,” he said. He expected to see the flash of a red robe at any moment. But they were ignored, just another couple of unknowns in this refuge for the unknown. “That’s why I’m here.”

“No,” Hope whispered, “I think you know they weren’t your real parents. And you being here is fate.” She smiled, held his hand and led the way.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk