Dawn n-2

by Tim Lebbon

  “And then the wellburr tree…

  “It all happened in one night. There were perhaps a hundred Mystics then, and a dozen of us had been chosen to harvest the seeds of a wellburr tree. That wellburr tree, in fact…the one you were hiding beneath, watching to see whether I would live or die. So we came here and set about our work.

  “This square was not here back then. This was almost two hundred years ago, a little more than a century since the Mages were driven from the land. Much of Hess was still a ruin. The rebuilding began, but here and there remained pockets of destruction, and this square was one of them. There was very little here, only an open area of rubble and crushed buildings. And the stake at its center.

  “The stake is what I need to tell you about. It’s what we saw. We were all aware then that these pools of destruction around Hess-untouched since the War, the only things still standing the stakes of wellburr wood buried deep in the ground-marked the scenes of a terror beyond compare. But the truth of it had vanished into the past, melted away with those Shantasi who survived the razing of Hess as they eventually succumbed to age, or disease, or simply lost their desire to live.

  “We avoided these places. All of us, not just the new Mystics. Weignored them. They stank of age and time gone off, and sometimes things came up out of the ground, sniffed at the air and went back down. We never knew what they were. Occasionally we watched, but we left them to themselves. They never came out, and we never went in, and over time even the wellburr stakes began to rot away.”

  Elder Darshall drifted off again, her hand stirring the waters of the fountain as if searching for something beneath its moon-slicked surface.

  “Elder Darshall? The wellburr seed?”

  She nodded. “The wellburr seed. It showed us. It gave us a glimpse of history. And ever since then, we’ve been trying to forget.

  “We all had the same vision. Not only the Mystics whose palms were pricked, but those who were back at the Temple as well, waiting patiently for our return. That has never happened again. It’s as if the Janne our ancestors brought out of Shanti mated with the wellburr trees, and their offspring was this one single vision. A warning? A prophecy? Perhaps both.

  “That night, six Mystics threw themselves from the Temple and died on the streets below.

  “I was standing close to the trunk over there, and when I felt a seed’s spines enter my palm, everything turned white. For a while it was complete shock. The pain was so deep and sudden that it did not register, and I had time to look around and see the other Mystics around me looking the same way: eyes wide, mouths agape, hands closed around the seeds and dripping blood. I saw their pale faces turn dark as our blood changed and flowed faster. And then the pain surged in, and the world lost all direction.

  “The wellburr tree put us there, in that old Mystic’s place. It was showing us the history it had experienced, making us a part of that past so that we understood. That’s why I want you to kill yourself. It’s too terrible. Too awful. And it will all happen again.”

  Elder Darshall’s hand stirred the water faster, forming bubbles that burst in the light of the death moon. The fountain pool had turned a dull yellow now that clouds covered the life moon, and the Elder’s skin had taken on a similar hue.

  “The stake?” O’Gan said. He was impatient to hear the rest of the story, yet he knew that an Elder should not be rushed. Even with a knife in her gut, this two-hundred-year-old Mystic let time go by at its own pace. “Elder? The stake, the Mystic, the wellburr tree?”

  “I want you to kill yourself,” she whispered. And she finished her story.

  “HE WAS CAUGHT by two shades.

  “His name was Delgon, and he was helping to organize the defenses on Hess’ western flank. They had been expecting the Mages to send a battalion of their Krote warriors across the Mol’Steria Desert to attack New Shanti, but instead the enemy used their stranglehold on magic to raise sand blights against Hess. The defenders believed they were being hit by a sand storm to begin with, and that’s why Hess fell so quickly. By the time they realized the truth, the sand blights were already taking down buildings and crushing the Shantasi defenses to a pulp.

  “Delgon fought on, regrouping close to here with some Shantasi warriors and their own machines of war. But another cloud of sand blights came in across Sordon Sound, picking up water as they came, and by the time they arrived they were so sodden that being caught in the open was like being struck by blocks of rock. The blights would breeze in and strip people to the bone in seconds. Delgon retreated, and was caught not far from here. The shades had been waiting. Immune to the storms, they entered Delgon together and carved their way into his mind.

  “He fell, screaming. He watched his warriors rush past him, leaving him for dead, and then a sand blight ambushed them and shredded them within seconds. And then it moved on, ignoring Delgon because he was doomed.

  “His mind was penetrated and laid open. The shades made it their home, finding life and experience and an existence they had never known…because they were not right. Not only the echoes of souls as yet unborn, these were shades aborted by nature because they werewrong. The Mages, of course, had put them to their own use.

  “I felt Delgon’s pain, and then time passed and he was in the center of an area of ruins. He was standing with his back against a stake of rough wellburr wood, arms wrenched from their sockets and shoulders dislocated so that his hands met behind the stake. They had been melted together by some blast of unimaginable heat. The flesh had flowed, and on cooling his hands had merged together, the bones fused. The pain from that…Delgon could barely scream. Any movement jarred his hands. His shoulders were on fire.

  “He was hungry and thirsty, and he had soiled himself.

  “He realized then that the battle had ended. Hess was a ruin around him. The sand blights had gone, leaving behind the remains of a city blasted with the bloody remnants of its previous inhabitants. The ruins were black with dried blood. The sky was clear, and Delgon realized that several days had passed.

  “The shades had gone, but they had left something of their eternal damnation inside him.

  “Most of all, when he closed his eyes and imagined the scent of the Janne blooms, he knew that magic had left the land.

  “I felt Delgon’s terror, and more time passed. His skin was burnt and crisp from long exposure to the sun. His vision was obscured by a gray haze, and he knew that the sunlight was making him blind. The pain in his hands had eased, but his shoulders felt as though someone was keeping a fire alight in them. Each slight movement aggravated the flames. He had slumped to his knees, his chest was tight, his stomach was distended from dehydration and an intense hunger he had never experienced before.

  “And then the screaming began. He had believed himself to be alone, but the first cry came from behind him, back toward the heart of the city, and he recognized the voice of another Elder. It was quite obviously mad. Other screams started up then, spreading back and forth across Hess like echoes looking for a home. Delgon added his own voice to the cacophony. It was as if they had all believed themselves to be alone, and now the only way they could communicate was to scream.

  “The screaming went on until nightfall, and as the sun went down and dusk hid the worst of the destruction, Delgon wondered again why they had all been left here like this.

  “An execution, O’Gan? Or an offering?”

  “I have no idea,” O’Gan said. “Something bad.”

  “Something bad,” Darshall said, nodding. “Delgon could not sleep. Tiredness swamped him, but the pain kept him awake, and the certainty that something terrible would stalk through the red-strewn streets to eat him. Magic had gone, and he would die.

  “So he stayed awake for three more days, watching the sun rise and fall on the screamed agony of the sacrificial Mystics of Hess. It was not until dusk of the fourth day that he realized he was already dead.

  “I felt the pain he went through: the pain of being dead. It’s like nothi
ng I’ve ever felt before, and I never, ever want to feel it again. I can barely think about it now…hardly talk about it…but imagine: you feel yourself rotting. You smell the rank stench of your flesh growing bad, your blood hardening in your veins, your eyes being pecked from your skull by birds. You feel the teeth of sand rats as they gnaw at your stomach, opening you up so that they can get at the organs inside. You feel your heart being ripped out…and you feel it being eaten from a hundred steps away, the dozen tiny mouths of a sand rat litter shredding it and fighting over every morsel.

  “Then you feel the action of their stomach acids, the pain of being broken down and shit out and lying in the sun to dry…

  “Eventually the weight of his torso ruptured the already weakened shoulder sockets and Delgon fell onto his face in the rubble. This was three weeks after the end of the War. The sand rats were shunning him now because he was too far gone even for them. But he felt the pain of decay in every part of his body. His wraith was trapped within a rotting corpse, unable to move, still attached to the land with all his senses even though his eyes were gone.

  “He suffered there for a long time. Eventually he came apart, and parts of him went underground. Suddenly possessed of movement, his hands crawled from the weakened elbow sockets and retreated down into the dark, his feet shifted themselves in opposite directions, and still he felt every wound to his body, every rip and tear of flesh, every bone prised from its socket…he felt them all, and his wraith started to wander this place looking for escape. Even if there had been someone to chant it down to the Black, the Mages’ magic had set it adrift and given it its own appalling doom.

  “S’Hivez had exacted his own vengeance upon those Mystics who banished him from New Shanti.

  “Delgon’s body rotted away, but parts of it remained mummified. They shift here and there, peering aboveground on occasion and showing themselves to anyone who happens to be looking. There was no helping Delgon and the others, so we ordered that these places be paved over and a fountain placed at their centers. Small tribute to such suffering. A paltry symbol.”

  She looked up, waved her hand around, dripping water into the dust. “His wraith is here now, and he still suffers the agony of death, and perhaps he always will. And we became the Elder Mystics. We swore that we would keep such unbearable truths to ourselves.”

  “WHY?” O’GAN ASKED. “Why not tell us? Why hide that part of history?”

  “We needed Hess to live again. Who would have wanted to dwell in a city haunted by such things?”

  “So you’re giving in? Every Elder is giving in just because-”

  “Just because?”Elder Darshall shouted, and the effort clenched her stomach muscles and extended the wound. She winced but continued through the agony, perhaps ashamed at feeling pain from something so negligible. “You have no idea, O’Gan,” she said, shaking her head and at last lifting her hand from the water. She stared at it for a few seconds, perhaps expecting it to be coated in Delgon’s blood. “You cannot imagine the pain…the time…every second an eternity.” She drifted off, still staring at her hand, mumbling something that O’Gan could not make out.

  “I won’t just roll over and die!” he said.

  “Heed my wisdom! It’s the end of the Shantasi.” Elder Darshall’s gaze went to her hand once more. “Mystic Delgon, guide my hand.”

  O’Gan moved, but he was already too late. Darshall clasped the knife with her other hand and ripped upward, slitting her stomach, leaning forward as she turned her hands and angled the blade to the side. He caught her as she fell, smelled her insides and felt the warmth of the steam rising from her spilled guts, and he saw the instant that life left her eyes.

  “I hope you’ll be at rest,” he said. “But it’s not the end until every last one of us is dead.” He laid her along the stone sill of the fountain and knelt beside her, chanting her down into the Black, trying to keep his mind from her story but all the time desperate to believe that she could no longer hear his words, see his pale face, smell his fear.

  He left the square and headed back into the heart of Hess. He looked for shifting shadows on the way, but anything watching from the darkness kept to itself.

  O’GAN PENTLE HAD been a Mystic for more than fifty years, but he had no idea how to command an army. That was the job of the Elders, passing orders down from the Temple to the upper echelons of the Shantasi forces, commanding them here, there, back toward the sea and out into the edges of the Mol’Steria Desert. True, he had trained warriors in his time and sent them into the world, condemning them to lonely vigils for absent magic. He often wondered where his charges were and what they were doing. Mystic he may be, but he had never traveled beyond the boundaries of New Shanti. He had read much about Noreela City, the Cantrass Plains and Long Marrakash, but he had seen none of it. The warriors he trained were destined to see the world, while he, a Mystic committed to the good of New Shanti, was tied to his land.

  He had trained warriors, but that did not mean he could command an army.

  They can’t all be giving in, he thought. They can’t all be killingthemselves!

  He hurried through the streets of Hess, hating every sign of the panic that had spread through the Mystic city. The streets here were mostly deserted now, many inhabitants having fled eastward toward where the sun should rise. Clothes lay trampled into the dust. A chair lay on its side beside an ornate iron door, and beyond the open door O’Gan could see the insides of a wealthy home, tables heavy with precious statuettes and floors carpeted with rugs woven by Cantrass Angels. Whoever had fled this place never expected to return.

  He could barely believe what was happening. The city was retreating without any thought of protecting itself, listening without question to the mad mutterings of the Elder Mystics and panicking at the sight of their public suicides. And why not? They were held in such high esteem, and if they viewed death as the only escape, what hope could anyone else raise against this catastrophe?

  O’Gan craved news from the north. Poor A’Meer, perhaps she had been making her way back to Hess with news of magic reborn and recaptured by the Mages. And if that was the case, then other Shantasi warriors could be making that same journey even now, crossing the dangerous Mol’Steria Desert or sailing across Sordon Sound, to find Hess abandoned, its populace running like sand rats from the jaws of a desert foxlion.

  “We’re not cowards!” O’Gan said. A man and woman huddled beneath a small lean-to darted away, startled from their hiding place. The man looked back at O’Gan, recognizing the garb but fearful of the barely contained rage in this Mystic’s voice. “We need to stand and fight!” The man put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and hurried her on. “You!” O’Gan shouted.

  The woman stopped and shrugged the man’s arm from her shoulder. She turned, and O’Gan saw the cool determination in her eyes. “The Elders are killing themselves,” the woman said. “Mystic, I have respect for you, but I also respect their message. There is no hope for the Shantasi against the Mages, they say. How can we believe any different? It’s a new New Shanti today.” The woman lowered her head in brief deference to Mystic O’Gan and then hurried away with her husband.

  “It is,” he said. “A new New Shanti.” He sat on a bench beside a tall hedge and rested his head in his hands. He needed food and water, but there were enough homes left open for that, and he would feel no guilt at the theft. He would need weapons too. His own roll of weapons was back at the Temple, but he would be able to find what he needed here at the edge of Hess.

  He wished he could ask the advice of an Elder, but he already had their story. They were dying into history, hurried there by their own fearful hands. O’Gan, the dusk, the fight to come-that was the present.

  Every moment wasted was one step closer to defeat.

  O’Gan stood to prepare himself for the journey westward. There, he hoped, he would find enough of a Shantasi army to command.

  Tim Lebbon

  Dawn

  Chapter 9
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br />   ALISHIA WOKE, BUT she found the waking world uncomfortable. Her vision was bouncing left and right, her stomach ached, her bones felt as though they were being forced together at the sockets, ground into place as though to merge with one another.

  A pair of shoes moved in and out of her field of vision, heavy leather soles bound with donkey hide and tied with twisted reed. A fledge miner’s shoes, she thought. They’re passed down from father to son. Rebound, rewound, the soles smoothed and shined by decades of use. They’re part of a proud miner’s possessions. That and the disc-sword…

  I’ve seen that disc-sword red with blood.

  She was being carried. And there was something wrong with the ground. No plants, no moss, no soil or dirt, just bare rock, cracks and fissures free of soil or dust, surface smoothed by time. It looked silver in places, yellow in others, as though the moons were fighting for control of this strange land.

  Alishia was not sure where they were. They had been heading for Kang Kang, but now Trey was rushing somewhere with her slung over his shoulder, and in his shadow there was no sign of the disc-sword.

  I need to know where we are, she thought. I need… She closed her eyes and, like a babe in arms, the movement of Trey’s journey across this weird landscape lulled her back to sleep.

  FROM THE DARKNESS came the smell of burning paper and charred wood. There was heat as well, though it may have been her own breath. She breathed in, out, and realized that the burning also came from within.

  Alishia opened her eyes. The library was still ablaze.

  She chose a route between two tall book stacks. Flames erupted at various heights, eating a thousand lives and leaving many more in place. Perhaps those surviving would burn later, perhaps not.

  She ran. She was not certain what she sought, but this library was no place to be sure of anything. She waved her way through a sheet of flames. They did not affect her, yet she smelled the charred stench of another moment fading away.