Dawn n-2

by Tim Lebbon

  I could help my child, she thought. Her daughter’s shade, floating out there somewhere, abandoned and never alive. What I could do with that!

  S’Hivez growled.

  “We’re here to fight a war with Noreela,” Angel said. If she knew what Lenora had been thinking, she gave no sign. “If we hand magic to any living thing, that thing becomes our enemy.”

  “I would never-”

  “You wouldn’t be able to help yourself.” Angel and S’Hivez started to walk away, leaving the shade flexing its shadows across the ground.

  “Is that it?” Lenora said.

  Angel glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “Almost. Watch.”

  The Mages parted and paused at the entrance to a road leading into the heart of Conbarma. The Krotes had seen their approach and quietly moved away, giving the Mages room to work. There was a sense of anxiety in the air, a promise of change.

  Angel and S’Hivez knelt and pressed their hands into the ground. The rock there quickly began to glow, radiating burnt orange spears of light which arced across Conbarma and sizzled out in the darkness. They crawled backward on their knees, increasing the distance between them and enlarging the spread of boiling rock. The surface broke into liquid, and a bubble rose to the surface and burst, sending molten stone pattering down around S’Hivez. He seemed unconcerned, and if any of the lava touched him, it caused no wound.

  Farther back, farther, and when the Mages eventually stood and brought their hands from the ground, they left a pit of fire fifty steps across. Angel glanced back at Lenora and smiled. “From here, the shade will raise machines,” she said.

  She and S’Hivez left the lava pit and approached an area of open ground where the mole was rooted into the mainland. It was here that Angel had first touched Noreelan soil after three hundred years in exile, only two days before but seemingly an age ago. How slowly time passes, Lenora thought, without day or night to mark it.

  The Mages touched the ground again, but this time they hauled rocks up and out without melting them, piling them around the perimeter of the excavation, deepening the hole with every touch. It took only a dozen heartbeats and then they moved back again, S’Hivez’s shoulders sagging as if the effort had tired him.

  Angel came back to where Lenora still sat astride her machine. “And that,” she said, “is the flesh pit. It needs filling, Lenora, before the shade can get to work. It has a touch of magic, but still it needs raw materials.”

  “Will that thing listen to me?” Lenora asked.

  “Shades take no orders from anything alive. But we’ve ensured that it knows its purpose.”

  Lenora looked at the shadow low to the ground, like a wound on reality. “You control it?” she asked. Is that what my daughter is now? she thought.

  “We gave it a promise,” Angel said. “There are many like that one, and they will work for us across Noreela. We’ll give them what they crave, in time.”

  “Life?”

  Angel grinned, and her smile was one that Lenora wished never to see again. “Is there an element of personal interest in this conversation?”

  “My interest is to serve you, Mistress.”

  “Then build me my army, Lenora, and do to Noreela what it did to us so long ago.” Then Angel and S’Hivez departed, melting away into shadows cast by looming buildings.

  Lenora steered her mount between two burning houses. She found a curved alley, emerging into a shadowed courtyard lit only by the sickly light of the death moon. The place seemed undisturbed since their landing here a couple of days before. There was a long table that had been set for a meal, though the food had never been served, and birds or other creatures had tumbled the bottles of rotwine that had been opened and left to breathe. Yet even here there was evidence that Noreela had moved on. It was apparent in the way the moonlight struck the plates, shadows stalked from beneath the table and plants drooping from wall baskets seemed to be shedding their tiny leaves. A few floated to the ground as Lenora watched, fluttering at the air like dying beetles. Noreela belonged to the Mages now, and the dusk they had brought down across the land was their first brand of ownership.

  Lenora stepped from her machine and walked to a chair that had been tipped over. She righted it, sat and began to shake. Her skin was warm, her head clear, and yet she could not prevent the shivers passing through her from toes to scalp, left hand to right. She sat on her hands and bent low, as if presenting less of a target would fool the shivers into leaving. She mumbled a plea to the twilight, trying to ignore the smells of heated flesh and fresh magic that wafted in from the harbor. Such stenches flashed old memories in her mind: the beaches of The Spine, Noreelan war machines cutting down Krotes left and right, the wounds she had received and the gouge to her shoulder delivered by a machine walking on legs of fire. Her flesh burning…the magic, ripe and rich in the Noreelan that sought to kill her, its sickly sweet smell…

  “Oh by the Mages, what’s wrong with me?” she whispered, and her tears startled her. She shook her head and watched them speckling the ground.

  Not long to wait, a voice said.

  Angel knew of her lost child; perhaps she had known forever. Did she suspect that Lenora would betray their cause for her own petty revenge? Was that why the Mages had given her their army, as bribery to stay?

  Was she really that important to them?

  “Iwill avenge you,” she said. Though her voice was quiet, it was firm. “But not yet. I have duties.”

  It’s cold, I hurt, I can never have you back, the voice said, and there was the truth, that muttered phrase from a thing that had never had the chance to live.

  “I can never have you back, either,” Lenora said. “Not even if I go to Robenna and kill everyone there, all the descendants of those bastards who whipped me from the village, poisoned me and slaughtered you in my womb before you’d even drawn a breath or given me a smile. I can never have you back.”

  But I can feel better, the voice whispered.

  Lenora nodded. “And so can I.” Her memories of Robenna were so vague as to be little more than faded dreams, but there was one image that presented itself to her again and again: a house on stilts, a stream running beneath it and a tall man in a white robe standing on its balcony, watching her being whipped with poison-tipped sticks as the villagers drove her out. Pregnant out of wedlock: that had been her crime. The man watched, and perhaps it was only her fervent dreams of revenge that put pity in his eyes. He had been the village chieftain, and the father of her child.

  “I need no fucking pity,” she said to this silent courtyard, over three hundred years and four hundred miles away. And she closed her eyes, imagining the man’s robe turning red as he was hacked to shreds.

  A NOISE FROM the harbor shocked her from her daydream. Lenora stood and looked around, glancing at shadows as they seemed to dart away. Dreams, fading into the Mages’ dusk.

  Another roar sounded, so deep that it vibrated the ground at her feet. Her machine did not move, but two of its eyes glittered as it watched her. She ignored them-there could surely be no expression there-mounted and urged it upright. The shakes were gone now, and her eyes were dry. Perhaps dreaming of revenge could melt away the tears.

  She steered the machine from the courtyard, through the alley and out between the two burning buildings, and then she saw what had made the sound.

  Both Mages stood on the mole that stretched out across the mouth of the harbor. They were constructing another machine, but this was larger than anything they had made yet. Twice the size of the largest hawk Lenora had ever seen, it seemed to float above the choppy waters, held upright on thick columns of steam. Angel and S’Hivez worked their hands into and around the rock, twisting and molding it to their needs, pumping fresh magic into this miraculous creation. The rock dipped and a roar of steam sent ripples across the harbor. It rose again, the Mages went back to work, then the surface of the water began to bubble and burst as dozens of sea creatures were sucked from beneath. Fish, octopus,
a foxlion, shelled creatures and something five times the size of a Krote with more teeth than skin-they all flapped through the air and landed on the red-hot machine, melting into it as the Mages manipulated their flesh and scales, bones and teeth, adding to their creation every second.

  Wings sprouted from its sides, one pointing inland at Noreela, the other stretching above the wilder waters beyond the mole. Eventually, with the machine complete, Angel and S’Hivez cast it down into the waters to cool into its final shape.

  When it rose again, they mounted its huge back, and it lifted them high above Conbarma.

  “There’s so much left to do,” Lenora muttered.

  The monstrous flying machine flapped its wings, sending clots of flaming feathers groundward.

  “Where do I start?”

  It rose higher and higher, and soon it was simply one shadow among many. Even the light from the moons failed to reveal its bulk.

  Now we are both alone, her child’s voice whispered, and Lenora shook her head.

  “Mistress?” a Krote said.

  Lenora looked at her warriors mounted on their machines of war. They looked intimidating, terrifying, lost.

  “Mistress, what now?”

  “Now,” Lenora said, “I need you to find a stock of rotwine and food. Post sentries at the town’s perimeter, but the rest of you will drink and eat with me, and we’ll plan the days ahead.”

  Lenora smiled, suddenly eager for the fight. And quietened the voice in her mind, telling it there was all the time in the world.

  Tim Lebbon

  Dawn

  Chapter 3

  AS HE APPROACHED another nameless village, Lucien Malini was hoping for a fight. Terribly wounded though he was from the battle at the machines’ graveyard, still he relished the prospect of wetting his sword again. His skin raged red.

  The battle in the graveyard was a day behind him, and with every breath since then he had known that the Mages had won. Magic was back, they had taken it for themselves, and yet blood pumped through his veins, clotting around his wounds, drawing rent flesh back together, stiffening fractured bones, feeding on the rage that was stronger than ever before. In the constant, unnatural twilight that had marked the Mages’ return he felt a sense of cool defeat, but deep down Lucien still had a burning purpose driving him on. He had seen the dead Shantasi melt and flow across the ground, and the implication of what that could mean drove him on. His whole life had been directed toward one purpose. The fact that he still lived, weakened though he was, gave him a sense that could have been hope.

  He moved on toward the village. It was a motley collection of huts and shacks-triangular constructions built low to the ground to weather the storms blowing in from the Mol’Steria Desert. No dwelling rose higher than his head, and it was only the contours of the land that prevented him from seeing right across the village. That, and the dusky light. It should be dawn-all of his senses suggested that-and yet dusk still clung to the sky. There were no smudges of the sun hidden behind the clouds, and the death moon sheened the land with a sickly illumination. In this light, Lucien’s blood was black.

  The Mages’ first effect on Noreela, with the magic he had sworn they would never again possess.

  From the village came the scrape of metal on stone. Lucien paused. He could see no movement, but the sound was shifting slowly from right to left. He tried to silence his breathing but could not; his injuries were too varied, their effects too harsh.

  He could smell death here, but he could sense fear as well. It was manifest in the silence, the stillness, the way that no door opened even a crack as he approached the village from the west. In the light of the death moon the villagers would see him walking along the rutted road. They would see his sword, his torn cloak and the wounds that still seeped blood. Some of them might even know of the Red Monks, and the cause that drove their madness. Yet today…

  “Failure tastes bitter,” Lucien muttered. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the road and ground it down into the dust. The scrape of his boot was loud in the eerie silence hugging this village.

  Not even the sound of an animal, a bird, a plant shifting in the breeze coming in across the desert.

  “I don’t fear you!” Lucien shouted, blood bubbling heavy and thick in his chest. He spat again, up at the sky this time, and welcomed the blood pattering down on his face. It gave him back his color.

  The sound of metal on stone came again, from two directions this time, and below it he could hear something dragging across the ground, like an echo of his foot grinding blood into the dust.

  “We can lose, but you can never win,” he whispered. And he still believed that. Through everything that had happened over the past few days, he still believed in his cause. He had to. If he lost faith now, his body would give in. His faith gave him power.

  The first shape emerged from behind one of the low houses, crawling slowly into view. He could not tell whether it was a man or woman. In one hand it seemed to be holding a sword, and its legs were clad in metal. Each time it moved, it moaned.

  Another shape crawled toward him out of the darkness. This one held two swords and wore a metallic mask, shiny in places and smeared with blood in others.

  The Red Monk stood his ground and hefted his own weapon, but he sensed no fight in these things. They were not coming for him. They were simply moving, because to stay still was to submit to the pain of transformation. As the first shape came closer, Lucien saw that they were not holding swords at all.

  Their hands had turned to metal. Legs too, and faces, flesh blurring to silver. And this close he could hear their moans more clearly, tell that somewhere behind that human sound of pain was an inhuman clicking and rattling as things inside milled together.

  Lucien could see human eyes moving behind the metal facade of the second shape’s face. They held nothing sane.

  He stepped back, avoiding these crawling monsters. They must have started changing before the Mages’ victory, yet still he blamed the magic. It was the cause of everything wrong in the land, and these travesties were more examples of a bad world growing worse.

  Lucien dodged past the half-human things and ran through the village. Here and there he saw a glimmer of metal beside the low dwellings, but he did not pause. As he passed the outskirts he saw the remains of a huge old machine half buried in the ground, and the death moon reflected from fresh breaks in the various metallic limbs. Perhaps it had spread like a disease.

  He ran, ignoring the screams of his wounds, and for a long time after he checked himself all over, searching for the first spikes of metal forming from within.

  THREE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Jossua Elmantoz had helped force the Mages from Noreela and felt magic forsaking the land. Now, crossing the mountain range southeast of Lake Denyah, he knew that they were back. Magic had returned, changing the world into a constant state of twilight. The only explanation for this that made sense was that the Mages once again had magic for themselves. They had found the boy Rafe Baburn and extracted the seed of magic he carried; forced it to bloom to their own calling, twisted it once again to their own desires. The very thing he had spent his long life trying to prevent had happened. He had failed. The Red Monks were lost. They would die and fade into obscurity, reviled and cast as demons, when in reality it was this that they had been striving to prevent all along.

  The end of Noreela.

  Jossua walked on because there was nothing else for him to do. He still held on to hope, because without hope there was only death. But everything felt empty and pointless, each movement without meaning and every thought existing only to drift away and be lost to history. Nobody would know if he lay down and died in these mountains. He would become food for scavengers. Or perhaps the carrion creatures would eschew his old, rotten meat-too tough for them, too strange-and leave him to rot into whatever the land was becoming.

  Noreela would change. The Mages were not here for control or power. This time, they came for revenge.

  But hi
s rage roared on. His anger at the Mages, his fury at his own Monks’ inability to halt magic’s path across the land-a boy, it had only beenone boy!-drove him onward. That, and the faintest idea that hope could never be fully extinguished.

  Something slinked out of the night and came toward him, a wild animal stinking of old dead flesh and growling deep within its throat. Jossua paused and scanned the shadows; his eyes were bad, and dusk stole what vision he still retained. He saw a shadow within shadows, and when it moved it was huge.

  The creature growled, and Jossua growled back.

  Footsteps scampered away into the night. Jossua growled again, to himself this time, and he relished the sense of fury filling him, flushing his face with blood, singing into his sheathed sword and demanding that something wet its pitted metal.

  He continued on toward Kang Kang. His aims were changed now, but his final destination must surely be the same. There was only one place left on Noreela where perhaps he could find answers, and where hope may yet dwell: the Womb of the Land.

  And he had a map.

  KOSAR HAD NEVER felt so wretched. His thoughts lay with A’Meer, and Rafe, and how he had let them both down. He should have remained in those woods with A’Meer, and perhaps together they could have fought their way to the machines’ graveyard, covering each other’s retreat. And Rafe…if Kosar had jumped at his legs and held tighter, or launched himself at the Mage, or fought with no regard for his own life, maybe then the boy could have been saved…

  He knew that neither of these scenarios would have been possible, yet he played them out perpetually in his mind. He and A’Meer fighting their way through the woods, ducking sword blows from dozens of Monks, jumping from tree to tree and scoring hits without being wounded themselves. A’Meer’s face, grim yet determined. Blood splashed on her pale skin. Her dark hair loose from where a Monk’s sword had sliced through the band.

  If they’d gone toward New Shanti instead of following Rafe’s suggestion that had taken them to the graveyard, maybe they would have survived. Kosar sighed. “The Mages would have found us in the open,” he whispered. “Come down on their hawks and cut us to ribbons. Or the Monks would have reached us first and slaughtered us out on the plains, or at the edge of the desert. At least back there, we had a chance.” He shook his head. What chance? A chance to follow chance just a little while longer, only to see it snatched away?