Dawn n-2

by Tim Lebbon

  “No!” he said. Yes. There’s nothing heroic here. Nothing symbolic. It’s cowardice. I can’t face the dark future with others, so I’m trying to do it on my own.

  Trey and Hope think they have a chance to fight the future, A’Meer’s voice said.

  “They know nothing,” Kosar said. It felt strange talking to the dark, but it acted like a mirror, turning his words back on himself. He was talking to his own shadow, berating a solitary shape that stood here in the darkness while Noreela prepared to crumble. He touched his sword and felt sick at the thought of violence. Didn’t he have the right to be scared? He was a marked thief, and his fingertips stung as he touched the sword’s handle. Any success he’d had fighting the Monks had been a reflection of A’Meer’s bravery, skill and determination. He was just a useless wanderer. A middle-aged waster who could not even steal anymore because of his brands. No one trusted him.

  A’Meer did, A’Meer’s voice said. And Trey, and Alishia, and Rafe. As for Hope…that damn witch trusts no one but herself.

  Kosar closed his eyes and squeezed his fists, grimacing at the pain from his fingers but hoping it would drive A’Meer’s voice from his head.

  “I’m just hearing things,” he said.

  And then the ground began to move, and he was seeing things as well.

  To begin with, he thought he had something in his eye. He lifted his eyelid and blinked rapidly, trying to expunge the hazing from his vision. Then he closed his eyes, and when he looked again the same effect was there: a blurring of the ground around his feet, as though the grasses and stones had lost their sharp edges. The death moon yellowed the scene and gave the undefined ground a creamy texture, and Kosar suddenly felt sick from the sense of movement.

  He fell to his knees and vomited, and when he opened his eyes the ground was alive. It stirred beneath him, parting around the warm puddle between his hands, undulating as though the ground itself had turned fluid. He stood quickly, and for a few seconds he could make out the shapes of his hands in the soil before the shifting surface moved in to cover them.

  “Oh fuck,” he whispered, because now he knew what these things were, and he remembered the last time he had seen them. They had presented a warning then, forming themselves as Red Monks into which A’Meer had fired several useless arrows. These were mimics. Knowing them, Kosar felt a vast, alien intelligence focusing upon him.

  He wanted to run, but he was afraid of stepping on the mimics. Would he hurt them? Would they translate his fear into aggression? He closed his eyes and heard them shifting through grasses, passing over fallen leaves, moving around and beneath small stones, sending up whispers that seemed to blur the air as their bodies blurred the ground. His stomach still churned. He wished A’Meer were here with him.

  Kosar tried to perceive a pattern or meaning to their movement. He could make out no particular direction. It was as though each mimic acted independently, fulfilling its own aim. Whatever communication might pass amongst them seemed to dictate no combined purpose. He wondered if they were eating or sleeping, talking or conspiring, and then the ground broke before him and a shape began to rise.

  It formed so quickly that it was fully there before he had time to truly comprehend what he was seeing.

  A’Meer stood before him. But this was not A’Meer as he had ever seen her. There was no smile on her pale face, no mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes, no sign that she saw or heard or recognized anything. The mimics had formed her upright, but this A’Meer was dead. Kosar had no doubt about that: her legs were gashed, her stomach and chest a mess of protruding flesh and bone, her throat gaping like a screaming mouth. Even her head was cleaved down to between her eyes. He could see her shattered skull and exposed brain. The mimics were meticulous in their detail. This was A’Meer as they had last seen her, lying dead back in the Gray Woods while he was probably still running up the slope to the machines’ graveyard. They had seen blood pulsing from her throat, and they copied that action now. They had seen her right eye ruptured and leaking onto her cheek, and that image repeated itself here. She was dead, his beloved A’Meer…and yet her mouth moved, as though she were trying to inhale one last time, or expel one final word.

  “A’Meer,” Kosar whispered, though he knew it was not her. Still, seeing that image, her death hit home like never before, and Kosar started crying. Tears blurred the vision, and then the scene distorted some more as A’Meer came apart before him-flesh flowing, bone melting away-and sank back into the uniform mass of mimics shifting across the ground.

  Kosar tried talking to them, asking what they wanted and why they had shown him this, but the mimics suddenly flowed to the east as fast as a man could run. The movement upset his senses and sent him tumbling to his left. He fell, rolled, and when he looked down, the ground was itself again. The mimics whispered away.

  “A’Meer,” he said again, but no more thoughts were spoken in her voice.

  Yet as the impact of viewing her death hit home, Kosar began to wonder what message the mimics had been trying to convey. By showing him a vision of A’Meer, what could they possibly have been trying to communicate? And why?

  Before, they had revealed themselves to Rafe, the carrier of the land’s new magic. But he was simply Kosar. He did not understand. He could not attribute intelligence to such small things. Hive organisms, Hope had called them, their whole effect the sum of their parts. They had shown him A’Meer, dead and bleeding, her mouth working at the air…

  “Final words?” he said. “Final wish?” Or perhaps the mimics themselves had manipulated her image for their own ends.

  The darkness seemed deeper than before, and more filled with unknown things. Kosar had never been too proud to admit fear, and he was scared now-more of the things he did not know than of the things he did. Rafe’s marking by magic and his subsequent loss must have affected the land far deeper than Kosar could have imagined. The mimics’ appearance, and the fact that they seemed to be offering help, was as disturbing as it was shocking. He had never even heard of their existence before a few days ago. Now they were trying to send him a message.

  What else could be stirring across the land?

  He stared into the distance, and suddenly the blank twilight offered him a revelation: the mimics had cause to deal with him! Rafe was dead and gone, and yet they still bothered with a cowardly thief fleeing something he did not understand.

  Something hecould not understand.

  They still had cause to appear to him!

  He started running back the way he had come. He had been gone for an hour, maybe two, and he hoped that they were still there. Don’t be gone, he thought. We need to talk. In the name of the Black, we need to talk now more than ever before!

  Stomach aching from his bout of vomiting, hand still giving him pain, Kosar ran once again, feeling the weight of Noreela falling heavier on his shoulders the closer he came to the fallen machine.

  THE OTHERS WERE gone. The space between the shattered ribs was devoid of life, as though the machine had stood here for a thousand years and its insides had long since rotted away. Kosar stood panting, just outside the circumference of ribs, staring at the emptiness within.

  Gone! He had come unerringly back, navigating through the twilight by instinct alone. It had only taken him half an hour at most, but in that time Hope, Trey and Alishia had left, abandoning this site of Kosar’s betrayal and heading south for Kang Kang. He looked in that direction and saw its peaks on the horizon, low and distant and yet menacing even from here.

  “Mage shit!” Kosar thumped a rib with the heel of one hand and it crumbled, sending creamy shards to the ground. So strong before, now so weak; he was amazed that magic could change so much. He circled the machine, trailing his hand along the ribs and the hardened skin that still hung between some of them, thinking about the short time this thing had been aloft and what it had been trying to achieve. At first it had simply moved them away from the danger: the Monks, the fighting machines, the Mages and their Kro
te warrior. But after that, when the danger had seemingly passed, it had turned south and continued on that course, so definite in its direction that it must have been intentional. Rafe had said that he needed to go to Kang Kang, and Kosar had assumed it was so he could hide. But perhaps there was something else. Maybe he was missing the simple truth, too eager to let fear and confusion cloud his judgment.

  Now Alishia wanted to go to Kang Kang as well.

  Kosar hung his head and tried to catch his breath. He was no longer a young man, and lately he had been doing a lot of running. Running, and fighting-and every waking second spent with those Red Monks trying to kill them. At the time fear had driven him on, but now that he’d had time to pause and reflect, his muscles had stiffened, his legs turned to planks of useless wood. He closed his eyes and kneaded his thighs, hissing with the pain.

  “Damn you, Hope. Damn you, Trey.”

  “Damnyou, Kosar!”

  A blade settled on Kosar’s right shoulder and pressed to the side of his neck. He felt the tension in the blade, wound and ready to spin. “Trey!”

  “Why have you come back?”

  “I need to talk to you and Hope. I saw something-”

  “You didn’t want to talk earlier.”

  Kosar pushed the disc-sword from his shoulder and turned. “I wasn’t ready then,” he said. Trey was staring at him, and the fledger’s face was yellow as the death moon. “What’s wrong, Trey?”

  Trey smiled. Then he leaned forward, laughter buzzing through him rather than bursting out. He was too tired to laugh properly. He stood after a while and wiped moisture from his eyes. The smile was a grimace now, and his shaking had turned into a shiver he could barely control. “What’s wrong, Kosar, is that the Mages have won. I’m starting into the fledge rage, which may last for days or even longer, and I’m nowhere near any fledge mine that I know of. It could well kill me in the end. You ran, and we thought you were gone for good, saving your own skin and leaving us out here in the dark. Alishia walked for a while, but then she collapsed, shouting about burning books and truth turning to ash, and I haven’t been able to wake her since. Hope is with her now…and Hope has her own reasons for being here, so I don’t trust her for a moment. I can still hear my mother’s cry. I can still smell Sonda’s blood, spilled underground. I can feel the Nax in my mind. And you ask me what’s wrong?”

  Kosar reached out, then dropped his hands again. Trey stepped forward and rested his head on the thief’s shoulder, weeping, his thin arms snaking around Kosar’s back and hugging him tight.

  Kosar closed his eyes and felt the fledger’s anger and hate and fear flowing into him, soaking his shoulder with tears, feeding his flesh with heat, filling his mind with a bitter shame that he thought might never go away. It was almost as bad as being in those Gray Woods again, having those things feeding on his darkest secrets and dragging them up for contemplation. Almost as bad. But not quite. Because Trey was a friend, and even though Kosar had abandoned him, now he had returned. Kosar hugged Trey, and realized that strength such as this went both ways.

  “Trey, I saw something out there,” he said. “Mimics showed me A’Meer as she was when she died, and there’s a reason for that. Therehas to be.”

  Trey stepped back. “You’re looking for reasons?” he said. “A couple of hours ago you wouldn’t listen toany reason.”

  “No, not back then,” Kosar said. “I admit that I went, and that I had no intention of returning. Everything feels so hopeless…I thought we should part, be on our own. I can’t explain it without…”

  “Without telling the truth: you don’t care.”

  “I do care, Trey!”

  “Really?”

  Kosar looked away from the sick fledger and turned south. “Where are Hope and Alishia?”

  “That way, not far. Alishia is weak. Whatever’s happening to her is bleeding her strength.”

  Kosar glanced at Trey. “Andyou look terrible.”

  “I’ve never gone a day without fledge in my life. And being up here seems to make it all worse. I can’t understand how any fledge miners manage to stay topside.”

  “A lot of them get sick,” Kosar said. “Is there no mine around here that you know of?”

  “If there is, how would I know? My home is hundreds of miles from here.” Trey dropped to his knees, sighing as he touched the damp grass. “So, are you staying?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kosar said. “We need to talk, all of us. Hope knows of the mimics, and I suspect she may have an idea of what just happened-and why.”

  “Did she talk?”

  “Who?”

  “A’Meer?”

  “No.” Kosar shook his head, remembering the way her mouth was opening and closing as blood gushed from her wounded neck. Final words? Last wish? He glanced up at the life moon still rising above the horizon. He thought he saw something pass briefly across its face, or perhaps it was a fleck of dust in his eye. “Let’s go find Hope and Alishia.”

  THEY AGREED TO build a small fire and camp behind a fold in the land. It protected them from a chill breeze that had come in from the north, and it would also partially hide them from prying eyes. There was the risk that they would be seen by anyone or anything approaching from the south, but they needed warmth and something hot to eat. Trey had found some fat grubs beneath the moss on the rocks that formed this natural dip, and he pierced them and went about cooking them over the fire. Kosar wondered whether the witch had used chemicala to start the fire, but she showed him the flints in her hand. I have nothing left, she had said.

  Alishia lay on her side, pressed into the shelf of rock and covered with a blanket Hope still carried. The girl was very quiet. Her scalp was bleeding. She had fallen soon after leaving the machine and struck her head on a rock.

  Hope sat close, brushing hair away from the wound.

  Kosar told Trey and Hope of his experience with the mimics. Hope’s eyes were wide, her tattoos reflecting her interest.

  “And there was only one image of A’Meer?” she said.

  “Yes, only one.”

  “And she was cut up, dead?”

  “Yes.” Kosar stared into the fire, seeing a hundred strange dancing shapes within its flames. When he was a boy he had dreamed of living inside a fire, exploring the molten caves of wood and coal, but he had never considered what the heat would do to him. He sometimes wished he still possessed that childlike naivete.

  “They went east?”

  Kosar nodded. “It was like having the land pulled from under me.”

  “I think today we can all feel like that,” Hope whispered. She looked down at Alishia and brushed the unconscious girl’s hair again, letting her finger trail through the drying blood. She raised her hand and tapped her finger against her lips, staring into the fire.

  What is she doing? Kosar thought. The witch licked her lips and glanced up at Kosar, and for a second her mistrust was obvious.

  “We need honesty now,” Kosar said. “More than anything we need to tell one another everything. Don’t you agree, Hope? If there is something that Alishia has, something she can do-”

  “Didn’t you run away?” Hope said.

  “I saw no reason to stay.”

  “And now you do?” She touched Alishia again, lifted a strand of her hair. “Now you want to help this girl, instead of leave her-and us-to whatever fate may befall us?”

  Kosar nodded. “The mimics came to me for a reason. That’s why I came back, Hope. And I came back to hear what you know of the mimics. You’re a witch. You pride yourself on such knowledge. I need to know why they showed me what they did, and what message they were trying to convey.”

  Hope gave a smile that lit her face. “I think the message is obvious. You’re to go to New Shanti to tell the Shantasi about Alishia. Trey and I are to take her south, to Kang Kang.”

  “And what’s in Kang Kang?”

  “You think I know?”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Hope looked down at
the fire again, and Kosar wondered just what she saw in there. I see the echoes of childhood adventure, scorched away by the heat of the real world. What does an old witch see in a campfire?

  “I can tell you only what I believe,” she said. “What I know for sure is so much less.”

  “I’m sure your beliefs are educated,” Trey said.

  “They are at that, fledger.”

  “So,” Kosar said. “The mimics. Kang Kang. New Shanti.”

  “All linked, and all coming together very quickly,” Hope said. She shifted and sat up, hugging her knees. She glanced down at Alishia, then back up at Trey and Kosar. Even now there was a scheming look in her eye, and Kosar looked away, unnerved.

  “How so?” Trey said.

  “The mimics-from what I know of them-can be everywhere,” she said. “They pop up here and there, but do they really move? I don’t know; nobody does. They’re as difficult to communicate with as the moons, or the Sleeping Gods. They’re part of Noreela, but no part that we’re used to. The mere fact that they’re intruding into our world, and our problems, makes it obvious that their presence is significant. That was no chance meeting, Kosar. They knew who you were, and they knew who A’Meer was to you. It was a very definite message they wished to convey.”

  “For me to go to New Shanti,” Kosar said. He thought of the mimics melting down and flowing east, and there was no other meaning he could read into that.

  “Why would they be interested?” Trey said. “If they’re so remote from us, why would they be bothered with Kosar running, A’Meer dying?”

  “Noreela is their world as well as ours,” Hope said. “We’ve named it and farmed it and all but destroyed it, but they live here too. I suppose they know how the new magic has already been distorted by the Mages, and they can foresee the effect this will have on them as well as us.”