by Tim Lebbon
Then he realized that there was no breeze, and no sand pricked his skin.
Yet the sound continued. O’Gan kept his eyes closed, hoping that this was the beginning of a vision. He had not breathed Janne pollen for several hours, though sometimes visions would come as the effect of the pollen wore off. But this was sensory: he washearing the hiss of sand. His mind was devoid of vision as ever, and as he opened his eyes he saw the sign that he had been waiting for finally present itself.
A shadow rose above the edge of the Temple roof. It came a hand’s width higher than the roof before falling and flowing across the stone. And it kept coming, like dark water pouring up instead of down. O’Gan stood and backed away, checking behind him to make sure the shape was not rising all around. His heart stuttered, skipping beats. He pressed his hand to his chest and breathed deeply, trying to calm his nerves. Not the Mages already, he thought. Please, not so soon! But then a true vision took root and bloomed, faster than any he had ever felt. Whole new vistas opened up to him, blank for now, but begging to be filled. Something spoke through the vision, asking him to open his mind.
“What are you?” O’Gan whispered. This high above Hess, his voice seemed loud. From below came the continuing sound of underlying panic in the streets: voices raised higher than usual, children crying instead of laughing, the clatter of wheels and the steady clomp of shoes on stone. Up here was silence, but for the whisper of this shadow and his own muttered response. His question remained unanswered, hanging in the air like a shape waiting to find itself. This thing had not harmed him-the distant vision suggested that there was no harm here-and yet it was dark, and O’Gan Pentle feared this darkness. Shadows moving within shadows only posed more questions, and however peaceful its intent, O’Gan could not calm the fear he had of this thing.
He moved back until he felt a Janne touching the bare skin of his neck. He felt the kiss of its blossom, but it was cool and moist, rotting rather than growing. The Janne reveled in sunlight and now they were being starved. This will happen everywhere, O’Gan thought. Grasses and herbs, trees and shrubs, our spice farms, they’ll all start to die. This will become a world of rotting things. The spreading shadow paused, as if listening to his thoughts.
“What are you?” he asked again. “What do you want?”
The shadow whispered and flexed like thick water, darker waves forming on its surface. It flowed closer to O’Gan but paused several steps away. He could smell nothing, see nothing other than the shadow, and yet he heard the constant whisper, as though a sea of sand were being stirred by an unseen hand.
“If you’re here to help, then I’m ready to listen,” O’Gan said. “The other Mystics have given up on Hess, but there is fight left in the Shantasi.”
The shadow began to rise higher before him, taking on depth and tone. It formed the shape of a person, and gave it color and character: the dark rents of wounds, the fading light in its eyes.
Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak or breathe.
She was Shantasi. And O’Gan knew her. “A’Meer Pott!” She had been one of his first students over fifty years ago, before going out into the land and never returning. Now here she was again, a living corpse rising before him, showing him her wounds, shouting a plea he could not hear.
She did not react to her name. Her eyes did not change, and her mouth continued opening and closing, dripping lines of dark blood and clear saliva silvered by the moonlight. She had lost teeth, and an eye was gone. Her head had suffered a terrible injury. She was surely dead.
Yet this was no vision. “A’Meer, are you there, can you hear me? Are you A’Meer’s wraith? Have you come for me to chant you down?” Her one good eye glittered with tears. “Are you really there?”
O’Gan reached out. A whisper, a hiss, and her image retreated across the roof before him, remaining a steady five steps away. He walked faster and still she retreated. He stopped and backed away, the image of A’Meer following as though bound to him.
“What is it?” he said. He squinted, trying to make out what A’Meer was saying or whether she was actually saying anything. Her mouth fell open, cheeks sucked in, lips pressing together before the whole movement began again.
O’Gan backed away to the edge of the roof and turned to sniff at a Janne. He chose a bloom that had withered and died, and the smell that came from it was one of rot and surrender. He winced, turning to the next plant in line. This one was tall, its blooms few, and a couple of them still seemed to be drawing strength from the ancient stone in which it was buried. He pressed his face to a bloom, closed his eyes and breathed in.
Hope…a voice whispered, but it was like no voice he had ever heard before. It was a breeze through the bare branches of a tree, the wash of foamy waters on the shores of Sordon Sound, the whispered exhalation of a lover passing seed and giving life. It was the language of the land.
Panting, he breathed deeply of the bloom. He felt the pollen abrading the insides of his nostrils and the sting of rupturing blood vessels, and he tasted the blood that dripped over his top lip. But he did not hear that voice again. He moved to another bloom and inhaled its pollen, glancing back at A’Meer’s image, upright and dead, listening for the single word that had been breathed to him from the first intense vision.
“Hope!” he cried, his mind buzzing from so much pollen. He walked toward A’Meer, swaying across the Temple roof and falling to his knees. “Hope? Is there still hope, poor dead A’Meer?” To see her like this was distressing, but to hear that word uttered at the moment of her death, tofeel it, seemed to justify every Shantasi death. “Hope!” O’Gan screamed, and for a few seconds the bustle of the streets below the Temple died down, and he imagined pale faces looking up to see who dared shout this word.
A’Meer began to grow indistinct and hazy and O’Gan reached out to save her. She was coming apart before him, fading as though she were a painting splashed with water. He moved forward quickly, and this time the image of the dead Shantasi did not drift away. His fingertips reached her and passed inside, pressing against her fragmenting chest and finding a subtle resistance that surrounded his hand, like a thousand flies alighting on his skin. He gasped and pulled back, and for a second a smear of A’Meer came with him, dropping from his arm and merging with the shifting shadow at his feet.
The whisper came again, and the shadow filtered back over the edge of the Temple. O’Gan sat nursing his hand and repeating that word again and again, hoping the repetition would imbue it with some power, some truth.
There was hope. He had not been wrong. Now he only had to spread this knowledge.
WALKING DOWN THE steps from the Temple, O’Gan entered a world he no longer knew. He had been on the roof for almost two days, and in that time Hess had changed forever. It had once been a city of contemplation and consideration, a calm place where street markets sold food and drink to the many people lingering in the communal gardens, musing on the problems of life and death. Mystics had wandered the streets, eyes closed and hands folded as they considered the meaning of a vision from their last time on the Temple. Sometimes they would pause and begin to talk, using their Voice to gather an audience. Their words would have depth, their depths would give meaning, and a dozen people would move on possessed of more knowledge than before. The Mystics were the brain of Hess, the rest of the Shantasi living there its blood. The Mystic city troubled some; its atmosphere did not suit everyone. But of all the places O’Gan had been in New Shanti, Hess had always felt most like home.
Now it was strange to him, and he was a stranger within it. Halfway down the Temple staircase he paused to look down into the streets. He could make out more detail than had been possible from the Temple roof, and he could see just how much Hess had changed. Not only the city itself, but the people. Panic had overtaken contemplation, fear had usurped thoughtfulness and the streets had grumbled with the last of Hess’ population of half a million fleeing. He had been watching from the Temple for some time, but this close he co
uld make out individual expressions and hear muttered curses rather than apologies when people walked into one another. One family pulled a large cart behind them, their belongings piled high, and they shouted at people to move out of the way, tugging the cart through a street barely wide enough to contain it. The father kicked a market stall aside, pushing it against the wall and stomping on spilled fruit so that the cart would not be slowed. The mother argued with the fruit seller, while two children sat wide-eyed in the back of the cart, surrounded by what their parents believed were their whole lives. Lamps still hung outside most buildings in an attempt to drive away the night, and the flames gave the children’s eyes a haunted look.
Many Mystics had joined in the flight. He still could not understand. “There’s hope,” he said, but he wondered how he could make them believe.
At the foot of the Temple, stepping down onto the ground for the first time in two days, O’Gan realized that the land itself had changed. It felt different beneath his feet, as though ages had come and gone. It was strange to him now, the rock beneath him unknown, the sand between his toes unfamiliar.
“Mystic,” a voice said. “Mystic!”
“O’Gan Pentle,” he said, already turning to confront the voice. A woman faced him, the hood drawn over her head barely hiding the bruising around her mouth, the dried blood beneath her nose. “What happened?”
“Mystic Pentle, I can’t leave the city,” she said. “It’s my home. My children’s home. Always here, always been here, and now this, this darkness that brings such madness…” She was barely coherent. Her eyes were jumping in their sockets, as though not wishing to focus on anything.
“What happened to you?” O’Gan asked.
“My husband wanted to leave. Said it wasn’t safe here. Took the children. I went after him but they’re lost to me now…I fell, and the crowds walked on me.”
“No one helped you up?”
The woman nodded. “An Elder Mystic. Then she left me bleeding and crying.” She suddenly seemed to find focus, eyes locking on O’Gan’s, pleading and desperate. “What’s happening? Where is everyone going?”
“They want safety, that’s all,” O’Gan said. “Your husband did what he thought was best. Your children…” But O’Gan could not finish. Mystics did not have children, and he could never hope to understand.
The woman looked up at him, tears slipping down her cheeks and reflecting flickering light from a nearby lantern. “I know he’s right,” she said. “That’s the worst. I know he’s right, and still I can’t leave.” She held her face in her hands and started crying, real tears that rose from deep within and shuddered her shoulders.
“There’s still hope,” O’Gan said, touching her face. The tears were hot, and neither his words nor touch seemed to help.
He moved past the woman and approached the door to the Temple’s huge inner hall. It was ajar. A sliver of darkness peered out-no light, no evidence of candles or lanterns burning within. He tried to drive away the bitter disappointment. Coming down, he had started to believe there would be Mystics gathered here, ready to plan the defense of Hess. Now it seemed that he had been wrong, and that the Elder Mystic had been right. Fleeing the city was the only plan they had.
He shoved the heavy wooden door with his foot. The hinges squealed, weak light filtered in and what O’Gan saw shocked him to the core. It was Elder Garia, a woman five decades older than O’Gan with whom he had often spent time on the Temple. She had enjoyed his company, and she had been close with several other Mystics, her natural disposition one of companionship and friendship.
But Elder Garia had spent her last moments on Noreela alone.
She was splayed on the tiled floor just inside the door, as if at the last moment she had changed her mind and sought help. In her right hand was the knife that had opened her wrists; in her left, a clutch of Janne blossom, stolen from the roof, rotten and rank and bleeding black sap between stiff fingers.
“Oh no,” O’Gan said. He closed his eyes, but that did little to hide the image. He thought of the other corpse he had just seen-the image of A’Meer-and the word she had given him in her silent plea: Hope. However that vision had been brought to him, whatever that shadow had been, he had to believe it was true. If not, then Mystic Garia’s fate was perhaps the wisest choice she had ever made.
O’Gan fled the Temple. The crying woman had crumpled to the ground, and he knew that he should help her, offer guidance through her confusion. But if he helped her, there would be another, and another, and eventually he would be drawn into hopelessness. He could help one, or he could help one million.
He closed his eyes and moved on. He often walked this way through the streets, continuing his inner dialogue as he moved, but now his dialogue was confused and the streets were unforgiving. He bumped into a man after a dozen steps. “You’re going north, Mystic,” the man said.
“And which way should I be going?”
“South, away from those damn Mages and whatever they’ve brought to Noreela!”
“I don’t think they brought anything,” O’Gan said. “I think they came and found it here.”
“Either way, magic’s theirs now,” the man said.
“Who told you that?”
“It’s the word everywhere!” The man lowered his eyes, uncomfortable at talking this way to a Mystic.
“There’s hope,” O’Gan said. “That’s another word-my word-and I want you to spread it. Will you do that for me?”
The man glanced up, frowning, looking over O’Gan’s shoulder at the tall, empty Temple. “Hope when all the Mystics flee with us?”
“Not all,” O’Gan said. He thought of Elder Garia dead by her own hand.
“Some are dead,” the man whispered, awed. “My brother saw them down by the coast, kneeling in the sand and drawing their swords and-”
“Mystics?”
“A dozen of them!”
“Your brother lied to you.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, but even in such a time he could not express anger at a Mystic.
I hope, O’Gan thought. I hope he lied. I’d have known if so many had died; I’d have felt it. Our collective mind would have screamed and railed against it…
And his mind when he breathed in the Janne pollen was a blank, devoid of life.
“He lied,” O’Gan said again, more to himself than the man.
“Forgive me,” the man said. He moved past O’Gan and hurried away.
There must be some of us left, O’Gan thought. An Elder Mystic, someone I can tell about the appearance of A’Meer. Someone who’ll know what that means, and what to do. Where to go.
A group of Shantasi warriors trotted past him heading north, going against the flow. Their long dark hair was tied, pale skin made paler by the poor light, and their extensive weaponry was worn so precisely that it made no sound.
“Good,” O’Gan said, and the last warrior in line turned to look at him. O’Gan saw terror in the woman’s eyes.
He walked on through the streets, looking for someone who could tell him what he had seen.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 5
FLAGE WAS BORN over fifty years earlier, when he was twenty years old. When he died.
Only a privileged few can remember the moment of their birth. But perhaps such crushing exposure and agonizing animation is best left forgotten.
He retained a vivid memory of that birth and the moments that led to it. He was a rover, prowling the northern extremes of Kang Kang with his small rover band, always traveling east to west to make sure they kept Kang Kang to their left. Left was the evil side, right the good. If they turned around and headed east, Kang Kang would be to their right, and its neutral influence on their roving group would change without warning. Right would become wrong, and Flage had seen the results of rovers traveling in the opposite direction-the shattered wagons and the torn bodies, the strange sigils carved into murdered men’s chests and the insides of dead women’
s thighs-and he had no wish to meet whatever had done that. Some said that Kang Kang was a mother with countless children, and each and every one of them served her without thought or question. They lived in the valleys of her flesh and the folds of her guts, and when called upon they emerged into the sunlight and made it their own. No one had ever seen these children of Kang Kang, so their appearance was conjecture and myth: the height of ten men, the girth of a horse, hands of stone and heads of bone, eyes lit by timeless fires from the roots of the mountains where dark things gathered around the meager light there was.
Every year, Flage heard fresh whispers of these demons, and each time their appearance was more terrifying than ever.
They had been roving and camping across the plains north of Kang Kang for a couple of years, gathering furbats from caves and canyons and milking them of their rhellim. Once every life moon, a group of rovers would travel north or west with the rhellim, trading with small farming communities or the larger villages around The Heights. They would return with food, drink and tellan coins, and news of the outside world that barely interested the rovers. Their lives were their own, and though they shared the landscape with others, that did not mean that there was any need to interact with greater Noreela. The land was dying, but they barely looked further than the next day.
When finally they reached the western extreme of Kang Kang there was an important choice to be made. They could turn north and head toward Lake Denyah and The Heights, perhaps adapting their trade on the way. Their chieftain had heard that there were still fodder being bred and eaten in the wild villages in and around The Heights, and he suggested that they could begin their own small business, breeding and selling these unfortunate beasts. They can rove with us, he said, eating the best meat and roots, drinking the best mountain water, then when their time comes they’ll command a good price.
Flage and others objected. They’re people, he said. They’re fodder, the chieftain responded, and the rovers entered an argument that lasted two days and caused several vicious knife fights. Flage had escaped the violence, but spent several days afterward nursing a wounded woman. Shurl had gone against one of the biggest men in the group, throwing herself on him when he had called her a fodder-fucker, and in a drunken rage he had pulled a knife and lashed out. Shurl escaped that first attack, but drawing her own knife had been a mistake: the fight was made, the other rovers drew back and within a few heartbeats Shurl was writhing on the ground with the man’s knife stuck in her right thigh.
