by Tim Lebbon
Flage helped her back to her wagon. When he drew out the knife, she screamed and held him around the neck. The wound bled profusely, and he had to press a bandage to it, pushing hard while Shurl strapped it around her leg. He kept the pressure on the wound, and now and then when Shurl moved he felt the soft hair between her legs brushing the back of his hand. He could feel the heat of her. Glancing up he caught her looking at him. She smiled, and he reached for the canteen of rhellim hanging from the cross support of her wagon.
Three evenings later the chieftain called another meeting to discuss where to go next. He urged caution and peace, saying that he had dispensed with the idea of becoming fodder farmers. But when he mentioned another alternative, a hush fell across the several hundred rovers. These people were rarely silent. They enjoyed music and talk, they loved and slept and danced in the open, they shared the most intimate aspects of their lives with everyone else in the band, and to be in the presence of so many silent rovers was an experience Flage would never forget. It made him want to scream at the life moon where it hung low in the north. But Shurl was holding his hand. He glanced at her, and she was serious and scared. Her eyes were wide. She too could barely believe what the chieftain was suggesting.
They could turn slowly southward, he said, passing between the mountain range’s westernmost hills and the sea, and then eventually turn east once again, keeping Kang Kang to their left as ever. That would take them south of the mountain range, into regions where no one had traveled before. That very fact should have inspired a sense of adventure in the assembled rovers-their life was after all one of exploration and travel-but instead, a palpable sense of fear embraced them. The silence was broken only by something calling far away, a soulful hoot from the mountains to the south.
The Blurring, someone said.
The chieftain stood his ground. No one has ever been there, he said, not even the ancient Voyagers. It’s called The Blurring because nobody knows what’s there. There are no maps of the land south of Kang Kang…there may be a whole new world down there! Kang Kang may merely be the gateway to places we can’t begin to imagine!
Peoplehavetried this before, Flage said. He stood, shaking off Shurl’s grasping hand. Travelers have gone down there and never come back. I don’t want to know why.
Maybe because they found somewhere better, the chieftain said, sounding desperate.
The crowd started to murmur, then talk, then the shouting began again. Steel glinted in the darkness.
The chieftain screamed a halt, and the rovers calmed down. Tomorrow, he said. In the light of day, when we can see Kang Kang and hear its reply to our ideas, we’ll put it to the vote.
Flage and Shurl walked away from the group, climbing a rise until they found a rocky overhang offering protection from the breeze and prying eyes. They sat close together, sharing warmth and sipping rhellim and rotwine, and when the fire of the drug reached their centers they tore at each other’s clothing and made love beneath the life moon.
Later, Flage was musing on the decision to be made the following day. He lay atop Shurl, still hard inside her, and she was smiling up at him when he died.
THE TUMBLER CAME from nowhere. Flage was looking down into Shurl’s eyes as they changed from smiling to fearful. They turned dark as something smothered them with its huge shadow.
Tumbler! she said.
Flage raised himself, still feeling Shurl’s muscles holding him within her, and then something landed on his back and crushed him. Their teeth cracked together. His nose broke against Shurl’s cheek. The heat of her flesh was suddenly so sweet and wonderful, and he would feel it forever, smell her musk and share his heat with her.
Then he felt thick, sharp spikes piercing his body.
There was no pain at first. He sensed his skin being pierced and the barbs driving in-his left heel, right thigh, right buttock, the small of his back, two more beneath each shoulder-and their invasion was cool and numb. The tumbler was twisting back and forth on his back, driving the barbs deeper and pressing him down onto Shurl. Her head had turned and she was screaming, but he could not hear her above his own shout of shock, fear and agony.
The pain came in a huge wave, rushing through his body from his feet, culminating in the back of his skull as he felt himself punctured there with one more barb. It drove in deep and fast, severing his spine and stealing away all sensation. His eyes went wide, his mouth drooped, and he watched Shurl fall away as the tumbler reared back and started to roll. Shurl disappeared beneath him. The peaks of Kang Kang fell away, the sky swung by above him and then the ground came up and punched him in the face. The tumbler moved on, crushing Flage’s body and driving its spears farther into flesh and bone.
Sight began to fade, and with every impact Flage became less of himself and more of the tumbler. Hearing was the final sense to leave. He heard his bones crunching as the tumbler rolled, a regularcrump, crump as he was crushed again and again.
He was dying, but there was something waiting for him on the other side. He found it in his mind as his bodily functions ceased, leaving him as a broken hunk of meat on the tumbler’s outside. It was a presence that he should not know, but did. It was an oasis of safety that he was scared to accept, a welcoming warmth that tried to swathe his free-floating consciousness as he drew back toward a darkness that hung behind. He knew what that darkness was-the Black-and his wraith stood before it, bemused and scared.
We’ll chant you down, the presence said, and he recognized it: a dozen wraiths, a hundred, all of them together and existing within the heart of this tumbler. We’ll chant you down to us.
You can’t chant me down, Flage said, and the act of talking without speaking drove him even closer to the darkness.
The wraiths started to hum, whisper and sing. He experienced the words and tunes without sensing them in any way. The music became a part of him as the countless wraiths sang, and he could not help but be drawn toward them and away from the dark. But wraiths are sung into the Black.
This is so much better, the presence said.
Dead, adrift, Flage let himself go free. And eventually-hours or years later-he was a part of the tumbler that had killed him.
FLAGE COULD STILL remember his name, though he had long ago ceased thinking of himself as an individual. His wraith was part of the whole now, an element of the tumbler-one spark in the flame of consciousness that surrounded its original, strange mind like rings in a tree’s trunk. Before, life had been difficult. Since his death and welcoming into the tumbler, there had been no such anxieties. While its physical self took sustenance from the bodies speared onto its hide, its composite soul became stronger with every wraith gathered.
There were wraiths of people who had been alive long ago, but Flage was not interested in their stories. Here was important, and now was the time. And here and now Flage knew that something was wrong.
It was not fear, but a sense that the tumbler’s existence was about to change. Deep at its core, the root mind was troubled.
It had been into Kang Kang and beyond, existing south of that place for many years, when the call came for it to head north. Flage felt the call arrive, and it hurt. It struck the tumbler like a psychic scream. Its mind quivered and shook, and Flage and the others were flung outward by the force of the tumbler’s shock. All around him came murmuring and singing, the wraiths chanting themselves back down to peace.
When the mind finally settled, and the tumbler passed between an endless mountain and a bottomless ravine, its wraiths combined to form the question. And when the tumbler answered they fell silent for a while, existing and thinking more as individuals than they had for many years. Something has changed, the mind had said. It has grown dark, and there’s danger again.
The wraiths echoed those words: Something has changed…
Still the fear was held away, but there was something in the tumbler’s answer that set the wraiths on edge.
Flage probed outside and knew only darkness.
Th
e tumbler moved north into Kang Kang.
LENORA SAT ALONE on a cliff east of Conbarma, watching for the first Krote ship. Looking down and west she could make out the town along the coast. The Krotes down there were preparing for the arrival of the main force, clearing buildings and making sure the harbor was not blocked by sunken ships or dead hawks. They were using their machines, and Lenora was delighted at how quickly the warriors had adapted. She had seen machines before, during the Cataclysmic War, but the rest of the Krotes had only stories to go by. Trained though they were-bred to fight and loyal to the Mages and their cause-they had never seen anything quite like this. True, there were the snow demons on Dana’Man, the foxlions that grew far larger in cold climates, and a century earlier the Krotes had fought a brief, bloody war with an army of creatures that rose out of the seas north of Dana’Man on icy chariots. But the machines were different because they represented the very thing that the Krotes had spent their whole life waiting for: magic. And while snow demons and creatures from the deep were living things that could be beheaded with a slideshock or stabbed with a sword, magic was unknown to them.
The machines had given the Krotes purpose. They cleaned and talked to them. In truth, it was magic that made and maintained them, but the Krotes had all developed attachments which Lenora did nothing to discourage. If fear was still present-and Lenora suspected that it was, however brave a face the Krotes wore-then it was a healthy fear. It made them stronger.
For the last two nights, Lenora had dreamed of the whole Krote army riding south on such machines.
Her own ride stood beside her, silent and motionless. Its eyes stared at her unblinking, and its limbs were tucked in to its sides. It would rise to her command the instant she touched it, and that gave her an awesome sense of power. What blood those limbs would taste! What slaughter those eyes would see!
And yet…the Mages had gone. That troubled her, even though they had left her as mistress of their entire army. She was humbled by their trust. The responsibility was immense, and if she conducted herself well and succeeded in her charge-taking Noreela, and destroying any resistance without mercy-then she would quite possibly be as powerful as the Mages themselves. If she was lax in her duties and the rout became bogged down in a costly war, then the sole responsibility would lie with her. There would be no pleading, no begging for mercy, no appealing to the Mages’ more understanding side. They would kill her, and over three centuries of exile they’d had plenty of time to invent some terrible ways to kill. Lenora knew that her survival was in the balance for the foreseeable future. She had nothing to fear from Noreela, but the Mages terrified her.
They had left her without a hint of magic. Instead they had left an aborted shade, imbued with a touch of their magic, and it was down there now at the harbor, sitting between the fire and flesh pits and waiting for the first of the Krote ships to arrive.
Lenora had never seen a shade, and she found this one terrifying. Not only because of what it was but what it had. The Mages trusted it more than her.
She was not jealous; she was too loyal to the Mages for that. But she was unsettled.
She sighed and looked north. The twilight gave the sea a whole new texture, skimming the heads of waves with reflected light from the moons and hiding the troughs in shadows deeper than ever before. She had sent Krotes north on hawks to keep watch for the first of the ships, telling them to instruct the captains to light lanterns so that Conbarma would see them coming in. She had sent hawks instead of a flying machine because she did not wish to startle the incoming Krotes. Best that they catch their first glimpse of magic on land.
The sea was a soporific whisper against the foot of the cliffs, and Lenora had caught herself nodding off several times. Each time her eyes closed she saw daylight, and when she opened them she heard the echo of a dream voice.
When she saw the first hint of light on the horizon her old heart skipped a beat. So soon! she thought. She stood, climbed aboard her machine and ordered it to stand. The added height gave her a better viewpoint, and she could definitely make out a splash of light far out on the ocean, blinking on and off as the sea swelled and dipped.
“Back to Conbarma,” she said, and the machine began the journey down. Already it felt natural beneath her, though its speed unsettled her so close to the cliff. The ride back to Conbarma was fast, and she passed the perimeter guards with a nod.
“First ship’s coming in,” she said. The guards sat up, and their machines twitched beneath them. “I’ll send relief after it arrives. There’ll be plenty for you to see.”
“Yes, Mistress.”Mistress. It would take her a while to get used to that.
At the harbor the shade was still sitting between the two pits, but the flesh pit seemed to be glowing.
“There’s a ship coming in,” she told one of her captains. “What’s been happening down here?”
The captain rode his machine-a tall, spidery construct-to her side. He sat higher than her, and he seemed almost embarrassed looking down. “That…thing plucked some animals from the sea,” he said. “They came up like a living wave, splashed across the harbor, and it gathered them into the flesh pit.”
“Gathered them how?”
“It pushed with its shadows.”
Lenora nodded. “Good. It knows the ship’s coming and it’s preparing.”
The captain stared out to sea, obviously pleased to have something else to draw his attention.
THE SHIP SLOWED as it approached the harbor, the great paddle wheels on either side almost still, turned by the vessel’s momentum rather than the efforts of the Krotes belowdecks. Sails were dropped and tied. Lanterns hung from masts, forming flaming eyes on the carved figurehead: the snarling likeness of a snow demon. I’ll never see one of those things again, Lenora thought.
The ship bumped against the harbor. Lines were thrown and secured, and the gangway was eased across the gap and fixed into place. The Krotes on the ship crowded along the gunwale, their faces a uniform yellow in the reflected light from so many lanterns. Some of them cheered, but most merely stood there, staring at the warriors on the harbor then looking around the town itself.
A few saw the pits and thing that stood between them, and Lenora saw their eyes widen.
“Welcome to Noreela!” she shouted. “Where’s your captain?”
“Here.” A shape hobbled from the shadows beneath the forecastle and stood at the head of the boarding ramp. Short and thin, her pure white hair was bound in two plaits that hung to her thighs. The end of each plait shone with a sliver of sharpened metal.
“Ducianne!” Lenora said. “If I’d known you were to captain the first ship I’d have had a barrel of rotwine waiting for you!”
“I haven’t had a drink in days, Lenora,” Ducianne said. “Fuck with me and you lose an eye.”
“You and whose army?” Lenora said. She smiled and made her way up the ramp. Ducianne hobbled down to meet her-she’d lost half her foot to a foxlion ten years before-and they embraced. Lenora felt her old friend’s scars, hard knots of flesh against her own. “It’s good to see you.”
“And you, Lenora. Where are the Mages? Has there been any fighting yet?”
“The Mages have gone and left me in charge.”
“Gone where?”
“You think I’d question their intentions?”
Ducianne grinned. “I suppose not. So you’re the mistress now, eh?” Her eyes shifted briefly, but it could have been a lamp swaying on the ship.
“There’s more,” Lenora said. “Lots more. But let’s get your Krotes off the ship first. And tell me, this darkness: Does it extend far out to sea?”
“It was day, then night, then day again…and at midday, as we passed Land’s End on The Spine, darkness fell quickly. No clouds, no setting sun, just a fading of the light. It spooked us all. Half of our sheebok jumped into the sea.”
“You look hungry,” Lenora said.
Ducianne nodded. “My warriors need food and drink, Lenora. It
’s been a hard journey. Storms. Cold. And an attack by sea taints rotted our food and soured the water. But there was always the fight at journey’s end to keep us going.” She flipped her head, sending the barbed hair plaits toward Lenora’s face.
Lenora caught them in both hands and tugged. “You’re a mean one, Ducianne.”
“Why else would I be a captain?”
They walked up onto deck. The Krotes were eager to leave the stinking ship, but they bowed to Lenora.
“Don’t bow to me,” she said. “Soon, others will bow to you.” The warriors rose, and this close Lenora was shocked at their condition. They looked gaunt, their eyes too large for their heads, and old wounds of war glowed pink in the subdued light. “The journey was never that long!”
A big Krote spoke to her, his manner deferential but defensive. “We’ve never undertaken a sea journey like this,” he said. “And there was a bad storm. We’ve all been sick for days.”
“Then you need fattening up,” she said. “Off the ship, now. You first. Go into the town and my captains will take care of you.” She turned to Ducianne. “There are machines,” she said, “and there’ll be one made for every Krote aboard.”
“Machines!” Ducianne said. “How?”
“The Mages left a shade.”
Ducianne’s eyes widened, but she did not deign comment or ask more.
The Krotes left the ship in a long, slow line. Each of them looked at the shade, and skirted as far around it and its factory pits as they could.
