by Mike Ashley
He ran harder, and the harder he ran, the thicker the air around him became. He needed to fight a passage through it. His feet were weights instead of wings. The wet pavement turned to tar, sucking him down, holding him back against his will, keeping him prisoner. There were more enchantments loose in this world than the magic of dragons. Dark things commanded more servants here than things of light. Ryan opened his mouth to scream for help and no sound came. Again and again he filled his lungs, again and again only black silence packed his chest and throat and mouth like wool. The tar hardened to stone, holding his feet; he could not move at all. He gathered his breath for a last cry before the hunters had him—
—and woke screaming in his uncle’s bed.
He was sitting upright, stiff as a doll. His clothes stuck to his skin. The waterlight that came before the dawn whitened the windows. He swung his feet out of bed and heard a crunch underfoot when they touched the floor.
Beside the bed, the little clay dragon lay shattered. He picked up all the pieces, glad to see that they were fairly large. Some glue should fix it. He assembled it dry on the coffee table and studied the results. All that was missing was the eyes.
He made himself some instant coffee and locked up the apartment when he left. The street was damp and cool from the rain. Puddles of oil in the gutter gave back rainbows. He stood in the doorway, looking down. The threshold stains did not stand out at all now that the concrete was wet. Soon who would know what had happened here? He fingered the tattered end of black and yellow tape still caught in the door hinge and tore off as much of it as he could.
He wondered whether he should call the police when he reached Penn Station and give them an anonymous tip about who had killed his uncle and where to find them. He could describe them exactly, send the police to the bar that was their hangout—
– if the police would take the time to listen to a caller who refused to admit how he knew so much. And if he explained? They’d believe it when the sky between worlds split open. But he had to do something. This was all he could think of to do.
He decided that the first thing he should do, even before he made the call, was to go and see whether there really was a bar where his vision had placed it. He began to walk.
The police cars were there when he turned the corner. Two of them were pulled up at the curb in front of the alleyway, blue and red lights flashing. The ambulance was sandwiched in between them. It wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry, but there was no need for speed. The stretcher slipping away into the back held a zippered bag.
The killer glowered and shouted obscenities at the yellow-haired woman talking to the cops. His hands were manacled behind his back, but there was nothing to stop his mouth. Passersby on their way to work or homeward bound from a life between sunset and dawn stopped to listen. The man did not care for the rights he had been read, it seemed. He was willing to tell the world what he’d done. He didn’t think of it as crime, but a service. He had cleansed, purified, rescued society from a monster. He was a hero, a knight, a slayer of unnatural horrors! How dare they call it murder, even when the victim had once been his friend?
“Honest, I don’t know why,” the yellow-haired woman was saying as the man was forced into one of the police cars. “We was all going along here, real late, and all of a sudden—”
She turned and saw Ryan. For an instant her bruised face flushed, then bloomed, its unmarred beauty embraced by roses.
Then the policeman said, “Ma’am?” She shuddered and shook off all seeming. She went back to telling the officer what she had witnessed.
Ryan stooped at the barricade of black-and-yellow tape. The rose was red without holding memories of blood or fire. It had no thorns. He breathed its fragrance all the way to the train station, all the way home.
FOREVER
Tim Lebbon
Tim Lebbon (b. 1969) has exploded on the fantasy scene during the last few years. He has won two British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award for his short fiction and his work has been optioned for the screen on both sides of the Atlantic. His books include the novels Mesmer (1997), Face (2001), The Nature of Balance (2001), and Until She Sleeps (2002) and the collections White and Other Tales of Ruin (1999), As the Sun Goes Down (2000), and Fears Unnamed (2004).
The following story, which was specially written for this anthology, is set in the same world as his as yet unpublished dark fantasy novel Dusk. In this world, magic has withdrawn itself after misuse by the mages (Angel and her brother S’Hivez). Since magic has gone, the land itself is in decline and the populace of the huge island of Noreela is apathetic and passive. Far to the north of Noreela lies a large, frozen island. The mages and the remains of their army were driven here after the Cataclysmic Wars a century before “Forever” takes place. And here they remain, awaiting their chance at revenge, awaiting the return of magic.
ON DANA’MAN THE cold bit hard, ice informed thought, frost froze dreams of freedom, and duty and supplication were the way. On Dana’Man there was preparation for a war long in coming, with no sign of its beginning yet in sight. On Dana’Man – island of the damned, natural home only to glaciers and snow demons and the ice people – life was hard, but death was harder.
The mages needed every man and woman for their army; death was unpardonable.
From a distance the island seemed huge and barren, a desert of ice and snow with a few silent volcanoes protruding like the fingertips of buried giants. It stretched east and west farther than the curves of the world, and its widest point north to south would take twenty days to traverse. Occasionally a localised melt would occur when the island’s only active volcano erupted, and the resultant floods would rearrange its geography for generations to come.
Closer in there were settlements, scattered across the low-lying plains at the foot of the volcanoes, staggered along the seashore, a few further inland. Some were long-deserted, others appeared to be thriving. Smoke rose high from countless fires, boats bobbed between ice floating at the coast, and occasionally a hawk would drift down out of the constant cloud cover, disgorge its passenger and then rise up again to its customary heights. There were even a few farms where snow and ice had been painstakingly removed and the ground given over to sparse greenery.
Closer still, one settlement clung to a slip of rock that protruded half a mile out to sea, curving around and forming a natural breakwater and harbour. It was here at Newland that the mages and the remains of their army had landed over a century before, driven out of Noreela far to the south and sent into exile. Fitting, then, that their new Krote army called this place their home. Boats and ships of all sizes rested here, most of them small fishing sloops, a couple of transports for carrying materials and people around Dana’Man, and two larger vessels brimming with tools of war. The harbour was a busy place. It stank of freshly-landed fish – much of it rank and inedible, gone to rot – and echoed to the sound of metal on metal from glowing metal-smiths at its very tip. One of the warships was moored at the breakwater, and once each day a giant trolley was pushed back and forth, the ship weighed down with more weapons.
At the landward end of the breakwater, on a slope where Newland spread and cast its roots into Dana’Man proper, a collection of timber and ice buildings was laid out in a regular, monotonous design. Pennants floated above some buildings, others were bare. Some were well maintained, others less so, given over more to evidence of violent times than careful tending. Hundreds of men and women walked in and out of the barrack complex, sometimes in groups or pairs, more often alone. They wore furs and leathers, wrapped against the cold, and they all carried weapons of some kind attached to their belts or strung across their backs. But there was no fight in the air today. Dana’Man was their island, and theirs alone. The fight they existed for would come later.
In one of the rows of barracks there was a tent made of whalebone and cured horse skin, and in that tent sat a man named Nox. He was a big man and, like most of the Krote warriors he shared the encampmen
t with, his clothing bristled with weaponry; knives, stars, maces, slide-shocks and throwing spikes. His hair was long and braided, more to keep it out of his eyes than for decoration. His skin was dark as leather, weathered by his four decades living on Dana’Man, and his eyes were as cool blue as the oldest glacier. He sat alone. Those sharing his quarters had gone for food. Had anyone entered, they would have seen instantly that something was wrong. Nox was slowly, deliberately slicing grooves into his arm, letting the blood well and flow from each cut before raising the knife to his face, scraping away a line of rough stubble and running the knife through each wound again. He was breathing hard and fast, swaying on the end of his cot, shaking his head slowly as if to spread and dilute the pain.
The stubble dug into the raw flesh of his wounds, stung him there, promising to keep them open and bleeding. When his wounds were noticed, he would be sent to the hospital barge moored at the end of the breakwater.
And from there, escape from Dana’Man – and the mages – was so much closer.
“How the hell did you do that?” Serville said. She was staring at Nox’s arm with frank fascination. She had always been one for blood.
This is it, thought Nox. This is the lie that changes me forever. “Foxlion cub,” he said. “I went down to the beach looking for crabs, and it was hiding behind a float of ice.”
“A cub did that?” Serville leant in closer, removing her glove and reaching out. Nox pulled away, wincing as his arm flexed and the wound gaped. More blood ran. Serville licked her lips.
“You’ll have none of me!” Nox said. He was sitting on his cot, furs splashed with blood, waiting for the words that may set him free. He thought it unlikely that they would come from Serville – she had been here much longer than him and was of the Western tribes, wild and hard even for a Krote – but the others would be back soon. He had to be ready.
“Did you kill it?”
“No, it swam away. Dived as soon as it took a swipe at me.”
Serville glared at him. “A cub bettered you?”
Nox shrugged. “I wasn’t there looking for trouble. I was looking for crabs. I wanted something different from that shit they serve in the mess.”
“We eat to live, not for pleasure,” she said, looking at his bloodied arm once again.
“You Westerns are so backward,” he said, and Serville threw back her head and laughed. Nox glanced at her belt in the second she looked away, marking her weapons. Just in case. She was part of his troop, but they had never really been friends.
Jaxx and Morton came into the tent, belching and laughing, and a gust of cold air and snow followed them in.
“Nox had a fight with a foxlion cub and lost,” Serville said.
Morton sat on his bunk, unconcerned. Serville went to him – they were together sometimes, these two, and Nox only hoped that they did not start right now.
“That looks painful,” Jaxx said. He stood over Nox and started down at the wounds. “It’ll scar well. Better than mine!” He displayed a fleshy knot on his own arm.
“You’re welcome to it,” Nox said. “And yes, it does hurt.”
“You should get to the hospital barge,” Jaxx said. “Foxlions carry contagion. And no offence, Nox, but I don’t want to catch anything you may have.”
There they are, Nox thought, the words that set me free. “You think so? It’s not that bad. The bleeding’s almost stopped and—”
“How long ago did it happen?”
“Just after you went to eat.”
“It should have stopped by now,” Jaxx said. “Krote’s don’t bleed for long, you know that. Something’s keeping your blood thin and your wound open. And I say again, I don’t want to catch it.” He stepped back, giving Nox room to stand. Serville and Morton were looking over now, sensing the threat of violence in Jaxx’s voice.
“A warm bed and the attention of those medics!” Morton said. “Don’t pretend you don’t want to go!”
Nox did not risk a response. Give myself away, he thought, they’ll know I intend never to see them again. Serville and Morton I’ll not be sorry to leave, but Jaxx has been something of a friend. So he shrugged his weapon belt over one shoulder, held his bleeding arm beneath his outer jacket and exited into the open air.
Nox took in a deep breath and let it out. Somewhere in that stew of stenches, freedom.
Nox had been caught by the Krote armies when he was a child. He knew nothing but his past existence, even though there were sometimes dreams that he could never truly know or understand. Then, he saw the faces of kindly people, green fields, a village working for survival, not war. He had no idea what had happened to that place, nor those people, and mostly he pretended not to care. He was as much a Krote warrior now as those born here, and he lived, as did every Krote, to serve the mages. His upbringing and training had made sure of that.
Newland, the only named settlement on Dana’Man, was where the mages had landed after being driven out of their rightful home on Noreela. So it was told, so it was true. They had landed here, nursing wounds driven into their flesh by the arrogant Noreelan armies, and they and their surviving Krote warriors had made the place their home. The harbour had welcomed them in with its long, curved breakwater, protecting them against the storms that had raged for all their weeks at sea, allowing them a gentle landing on this place of snow and ice. And now, though the mages were rarely seen away from their volcano lair miles inland, this harbour was still a special place.
Nox had lived here all his life, venturing away only to train on the mountain slopes inland, or to join a raiding party to the islands far to the east and west of Dana’Man. He ate here, trained for the promised war to come, slept, screwed, drank, made friends and lost them. He returned here to nurse occasional wounds suffered on raids. He relaxed here on those days given over to leisure, hunting sea snakes with his friends, wrestling and sparring on the harbour front. He called it home. And yet . . . there were those dreams. Fields of green, not white. Striving for survival and peace, not war. And Nox had begun to wonder more and more just where those dreams could lead.
He walked out of the barracks and headed down the gentle slope into Newland. From here he could see the whole expanse of the natural harbour, curved out into the sea like the arm of Dana’Man itself. Boats were docked all along the breakwater, but it was the two warships that stood out. Five times larger than any other vessel, they sported huge masts and furled sails, ready for sailing at a moment’s notice. Snow and ice made surreal sculptures of their rigging. From this distance Nox could barely make out individual people walking along the harbour, but there was a sense of continuous movement about the port which made him yearn, briefly, for the relative calm of the barracks.
But his arm throbbed, and the stubble in the wounds kept them open and leaking. He withdrew it from the cover of his jacket and was surprised at the amount of blood still running from the cuts. How ironic it would be to die from blood-loss, now that he had finally found the nerve to attempt escape. After all these years, all those vague notions of fleeing, no one would know. He would slump down here in the snow and, dreaming of green fields, his life would filter away into the ice of ages. They would find his corpse frozen into the hillside, thaw him and feed him to the trained hawks that came down on occasion from above the clouds. Killed by a foxlion cub, they would say, probably mocking him. And in weeks or days, he would not even be a memory.
Nox shook his head and bit his lip, the pain stinging him into action. He hurried on toward the harbour. He could make out the hospital barge now, right at the end of the breakwater past the weapons workshops. And beyond that there was open sea, and freedom.
When he was seventeen Nox already knew the meaning of faith. The subjects of his faith were the mages – sinister, elusive S’Hivez; beautiful, terrible Angel – and his belief was strong and profound. He had faith in the fact that he was there to serve them, and nothing else. Those brief memories of childhood were dream fragments frozen by the snows and ice of Dan
a’Man, their meaning lost, any emotion conjured by them scorched away by the frost. The mages were his masters, and everything he was, everything he would be, was because of them. He was a soldier, and one day they would call on his services to take revenge on the people far to the south that had driven them away. They owned his mind and, most of the time, his heart.
Most of the time. Because even pure faith is fickle. And one evening, lying in a sweaty tangle with a female Krote warrior, sated, sharing body warmth against the freezing air outside, he uttered a brief, illicit sentence. “One day, maybe we’ll get out of here.” The Krote mumbled something and shifted, her hands searching for the hottest part of him, and within minutes Nox had forgotten the thought that had conjured those words.
But above them, in shadows cast between the ceiling and wall of the tent, something blinked out of existence. It was a nothing, not even blackness; a shade, a ghost of a soul yet to be born. It too served the mages, though it had no mind to doubt, nor a heart to debate. It skimmed away beneath the surface of reality, back to its masters. And though the words meant nothing to the shade, the mages heard and stored them for the future.
Nursing his bleeding arm, Nox entered the outskirts of the harbourside. The iced road had been powdered with volcanic ash to make the going easier. Snow had been cleared from the rooftops, icicles hacked away from windows, and animal hides hung heavy across doorways. All the timber used in construction was brought in from other places, and along with the materials came slaves to do the building. There were dozens of them in the streets. Nox paid them as much attention as he did snow goats and sea gulls. They were below his contempt. Human, yes, but beyond that there was little to compare the slaves to the Krote masters they served. The mages used some arcane chemicala to drive down any rebellion in the imported slaves, and they strolled through the streets like dim-witted goats, heavily muscled and vacant. Nox met their gazes occasionally and saw no intelligence there. Instinct kept them out of the Krotes’ paths, and interaction was unheard of.
