Dawn n-2

by Tim Lebbon

  I wonder if that was someone I knew, she thought. She paused and turned around, reaching for a burning book, pulling it from the shelf, letting it fall open in her hands and seeing only three words before the fire ate them away: never knew her. She dropped the charred mess and it broke into dust.

  She ran on, ducking through the flames and never fearing them. This washer place; they could not harm her here. The passage remained straight for some time, and though she passed a thousand books every few seconds, she knew that they were not for her. Something was drawing her toward a truth that she must discover.

  There was the place below the library, the cave, but she had been there already and it provided only a warning. Hope, she thought. I didn’t see her when I was awake. And Trey was running!

  Something fell in the distance. A book stack or a wall, a floor giving way or a tower of loose books tumbling as fire ate away at their foundation. Alishia paused and turned, trying to decide which direction the crash had come from. Millions of books dampened the sound. She turned left and right but the noise faded away, and there was nothing to do but carry on running.

  It’s coming apart so quickly, she thought. The fire spreads faster than I could have believed. She jumped through another wall of flame and crashed into a pile of books, falling to the floor, barely feeling the impact.

  One of the books landed beside her, flipping open at a page begging to be read. She closed her eyes. Closed the book without looking. Opened her eyes again and glanced at the spine: A Heartbeat in the Heart of the Sleeping God. She pushed the book away and it opened again, and she read of Hope in the belly of the beast.

  Only bad could come of this. Trey was running toward something awful, and she had to wake to tell him, warn him, because onlybad could come of this.

  Touch its heart and Hope fades away, the line in the book said. The only line. The rest of it was yet to be written.

  HOPE WAS A young girl again, exploring north of Pavisse on her own because nobody wished to play with a witch. There were occasional friends, but they kept their distance, as if she really could plant some dubious spell on them. She asked her mother why they were like that, and her mother would smile, her green tattoos twisting around her neck like a snake tightening to withhold her answer. They’re scared of you, she would say. They know what you can do.

  But Hope knew that she could do nothing, and her child’s brutal logic revealed the truth: other children did not play with her because they thought she was a fool. Even a child knew that there was no magic. Hope was a fool from a long line of fools, and children did not suffer fools gladly.

  She had been to these woods many times before. They were familiar to her, and safe. It was a fine day, the sun was warm and kind on her face, and the first of her many tattoos was healing on her right cheek.

  She paused and smiled, and felt the tattoo do the same.

  The forest was small but few people visited. The people of Pavisse had more to trouble themselves with than walks amongst the trees, unless the walks themselves were toward something relevant. Once, she had been in the woods when a man ran past. She ducked down but he had seen her. His eyes turned left, wide and fearful, and he watched for a couple of beats before running on. Hope remained hidden for a while until she heard the dogs, and then she stood and revealed herself to the militia so that she was not attacked. They did not ask whether she had seen the man, and she did not volunteer the information.

  Another time, she had stumbled across a couple having sex. The man was old and gray, the woman younger than her, and Hope had kept a guilty watch on them for over an hour while they fucked, rested and fucked again. There was real passion between that old man and young woman, and Hope felt sorry that they had to come this far to be on their own.

  Later that day she had told her god about them, and it had given her its customary silent reply.

  She reached her god in the ground and knelt before it, almost touching its surface, almost feeling its coolness or warmth, its smoothness or rough skin, the stillness of death or the invisible vibration of life. She had never touched her god, and she never could. Gods were not for that.

  She began to mutter invocations she had heard her mother using, words and sentences in a language forgotten by most. It’s the language of the land, her mother had told her, and Hope’s memory did its best to repeat the words as they had been spoken: the same tone, same intonation.

  It’s a machine, a soft voice whispered. It was her voice, but she did not like to listen. It told painful truths. It’s just a dead machine.

  Something tickled her hip and she slapped at her clothes. Nothing changed.

  She chanted some more, bringing her hands so close to the god half buried in the ground that she could feel its gravity pulling her closer and closer. One day it would move, she knew. One day she would come here and present herself before this god, and it would rise, and she would become the first real witch since the Cataclysmic War had stolen magic away. One day she would remember the correct invocation from her mother, mutter it in just the right way, and this god would shrug off its layers of rust and moss, bird shit and decay…

  It’s just a machine, and you’re wasting your time. The only gods are the Sleeping Gods, and they’re just a story your mother tells you when it’s too stormy outside for you to go to sleep…

  Another movement against her hip, grotesque and familiar.

  Hope looked around the woodland glade but the light was starting to fail. Dusk isn’t for hours yet. A light blue haze rose from the ground, wafting around her knees. It shouldn’t be this dark. She was farther away from the god (dead machine!) than ever before, and then the smell of pine and wellburr trees faded away, replaced by the dust of ages.

  I only wanted a god to give me magic, she said, and her young woman’s words woke her with their old lady’s voice.

  HER FINAL WORD faded away, swallowed by the walls. No echoes here.

  The gravemaker spider flexed in her pocket. Hope had been lying on her side, and the spider had obviously been crushed from its hedgehock sleep. She sat up and reached into the pocket, grabbing the spider by two legs and letting it dangle before her. Its other legs clenched, its body rose, but it could not bring its fangs close enough to bite.

  “I’ve been away,” she said, and an endless amount of time may have passed. Nothing would have changed in here: the walls would still glow, the floors would still swim in that strange, opaque mist…and the thing on the pedestal would still be there.

  She could not bring herself to look, in case there was an eye staring back.

  Hope waved the spider before her, holding it at arm’s length. “Shall we stand?” she said. She stood, still clasping the disc-sword in her other hand. She was shaking. Still she could not look at the Sleeping God. She thought of that young version of herself, worshipping the hunk of rusted metal and cracked stone in the ground, and she was ashamed. So long spent kneeling before old magic, while the true gods were older still.

  Her legs shook. Her tattoos writhed of their own accord as her face twitched, nerves jumped. She needed to piss, but the thought of doing so here terrified her.

  She almost looked…

  The spider curled around her finger and scraped her nail with its fangs.

  “Almost,” she said. She dropped the spider, kicking it away from her, and watched it scurrying through the haze toward the pedestal. As it drew close, the Sleeping God entered her field of vision, and then she looked because there was nothing more to do, no more distance to travel, no more dreams to be had between that instant and the next.

  She had spent so long imagining what this could be like, but she never believed it would be her.

  “Wake,” she whispered.

  She could make no sense of what she saw. Her eyes took in the shape but her mind could not translate the vision.

  “Wake for me!”

  The shape remained motionless. It was the size of ten people curled together, limbs and heads and torsos twisted arou
nd one another. She could see no eyes, hear no breathing. It mustbe alive, she thought, but she was too insignificant to understand. She stood in the presence of a god, and all she could do was ask it to wake.

  She took one step forward and there was no scream of outrage. She could look at the thing now, and though she was unsure of exactly what she was seeing, at last she believed her eyes.

  Another step forward.

  The gravemaker spider crawled up the side of the Sleeping God and sat atop it like a disembodied hand.

  Hope held her breath. Stared at the spider. Felt her pulse throbbing at her temple, her chest, her thigh. Her heart thumped, punching her as if to draw attention to something here, and here, andhere!

  The spider reared up, baring its fangs, and Hope saw what lay around the base of the pedestal. The light in the huge cavern was weak, yet she could see the drifts of ancient dust. It was orange, like the flaking rust that had drifted from that old machine in the woods long ago, and fine as sand.

  “No…”

  The spider hissed as if it had heard her.

  Hope moved three steps closer and nothing in the cavern changed.

  Orange, like rust.

  “No…!”

  She looked around her then, because the cavern had suddenly become something else. Her mind tilted. She felt it, a movement that shifted her slightly out of this world and into another. She lost whatever precarious grip she had possessed on her own destiny and fell, slipping between the fingers of Fate and plummeting toward whatever end this new bastard world had ready for her.

  “No!”She screamed long and loud, and then stepped forward to touch the thing she had believed would save them all.

  The Sleeping God was not inside; Hope was inside the Sleeping God.

  And on the tail of that shocking realization came another, a truth that hit her like fire and burned away her hope, shattering her mind with rage and grief and making real every fear she had ever felt.

  This God was no longer sleeping. This Sleeping God was dead.

  TREY REACHED WHERE he had seen Hope disappear and lowered Alishia to the ground. He shook with exertion, kneeling with the unconscious librarian and making sure her head rested on his leather bag. The ground was totally bare of anything here, just exposed rock with clean cracks and wider, deeper crevasses.

  Hope had apparently fallen into one of these. And there was something down there, a punctured layer of some material that seemed a different color from the rock. It was curved, textured, and there was a hole in its surface close to the wall of the crevasse. He could have reached it if he lay prone across the ground…but he did not like the thought of what may rise from there. The catastrophe that had befallen Noreela had uncovered this buried thing, and Trey understood with complete clarity that this was something that should have always remained buried.

  “Hope,” he whispered, but she did not appear.

  Moonlight sheened the strange surface, but it seemed to exude a luminescence from within as well. Trey did not like this light. It looked dirty, and he shuffled backward to avoid it.

  The landscape was silent, save for a slight breeze blowing in from the north. It brought with it the smell of disturbed ground and uprooted plants. He was surrounded by a plain of rock, gray and dead and smeared with moonlight here and there. Shadows hid also, in deep places where the holes could conceal things far more mysterious, and far more deadly.

  Really? he thought. Is there anythingmore mysterious than this? He leaned forward again and glanced into the hole…and then he heard the sound.

  Muffled, distant and dulled, nonetheless it was a scream.

  “Hope?”

  Alishia stirred beside him, rolling onto her side and opening her eyes. For an instant Trey thought he saw clear blue flames within her pupils, and he glanced up to see whether the darkness had parted to reveal blue sky. But the dusk was as deep as ever.

  “…her own book of madness…” Alishia said.

  “Alishia?” Trey touched her face and tilted her head to the side, looking into her eyes and realizing that she was not awake at all. Her mouth was slack, her chin limp and her eyes reflected nothing of what he could see.

  “…Hope…” she whispered.

  “She’s coming,” Trey said, and a frown creased Alishia’s forehead.

  The scream came again, and the miner recognized how it found its way to his ears: it was eaten and spat out again, an echo wending around subterranean corners and through cracks in the land.

  Hope sounded terrified.“They’re coming!” she screamed.

  Trey shivered. What was coming? The Nax? Had she gone deep and found them awake? But if that were the case, she would be dead.

  He should shout to her, guide her up, lean down into the hole, ready to haul her out of the ground and away from whatever pursued her. But he did not. Because of that look on Alishia’s face, and the depth of the sleeping nightmare in her open eyes.

  WHEN HOPE TOUCHED the object-the middle, the center, the giant dried heart of this old dead thing-it disintegrated.

  The gravemaker spider still sat atop the fossilized heart as it came apart. The creature’s legs thrashed below it where before there had been rigidity, and Hope knew how it felt. The whole world had been ripped out from under her. Reality, already struggling to maintain its tenuous hold on the land, had given way to nightmare. As the spider fell so did Hope’s mind, both of them lost in a cloud of dust as the Sleeping God’s heart came apart. It went to grit, sandy blood and a haze of history spinning around inside this buried corpse.

  Hope tried to scream, but it came as a keen. She could not move. Her hand was still held before her, fingers splayed, their tips grayed with the God’s dust. She drew in another breath and the dust coated her throat. It hurt when she breathed. It hurt when she thought. Here is the history of the land…dead…dead and dry, like a corpse left out in the sun.

  The gravemaker spider appeared again. It had risen in the dust and re-created itself, and each dust particle began to mimic it. There were five spiders now, and fifteen, and a hundred, all of them crawling slowly toward Hope on the dust that webbed her vision. Still she keened, trying to scream past the grit that clogged her throat.

  The spiders came closer. She should have never come down here. The people she had killed smiled in their secret graves, and she turned and ran back the way she had come. She used the disc-sword to haul herself up the slope of the Sleeping God’s chest cavity, wincing at every hack and cut, digging in with the fingers of her other hand.

  From behind her, the sound of sand falling, small feet rushing. She started to glance back but saw the air moving, so she looked forward again. She jerked the disc-sword free and leapt up, jamming it into the ground again and pulling with all her might, kicking with her feet, clawing with her other hand, and then she reached the rent and pulled herself inside.

  The walls still glowed but the light was changing now, phasing out, flickering back in again and revealing nothing new.

  Hope paused and listened for a miraculous heartbeat. But there was nothing other than the gravemaker spiders following her, born of dead dust. They sounded like the sea washing onto a sandy beach. There must have been a million of them.

  She screamed and drove forward, coughing and spitting dust that turned into spiders.

  She swatted at them as she went. Their bodies burst back to dust, fell apart as the disc-sword swung, and she felt the unbelievable weight of them forcing her on.

  She emerged into the huge cavern and fell from the narrow crack, feeling solidified veins cracking around her. She stood and swung back, hacking at the shadows that had already started falling out behind her. The spiders screeched as they died. She had never heard a spider screech before. She added her scream to their death cries and backed away, trying to follow the path she had made earlier.

  The spiders poured into the cavern like a wave of black oil. They ate what little light there was, giving off no reflection.

  Hope stomped. Her scre
am was free now, her throat clear of dust at last, and she vented her fear as she turned and ran for her life.

  Everything she saw or touched, everything she breathed in, was the Sleeping God. She was looking at its insides. Dry now, fossilized and dead; still, this was the most amazing thing she had ever seen in her long life. The most amazing, and the most dreadful. If the Sleeping Gods die, what hope is there for the rest of us?

  “They’re coming!”she screamed, feeling the dark wave lapping at her feet as she ran. The spiders crawled up her ankles, her calves, but they did not bite. Perhaps they’ll cover me, smother me, keep me down here to die and dry in this dead dry thing…

  And then the light began to change and Hope saw moonlight. She had fallen and crashed through the Sleeping God’s skin, entered its body searching for its self, and now the chance that she would escape was here in this splash of yellow moonlight.

  Death moon, lighting the way for me, giving me sight to see the spiders come and take me. They’ll all bite at once and my heart will explode and my body will rupture and spread me across the stony flesh of this God, my fresh blood, my corrupted mind…

  “Hope!” The fledge miner was up there, his head a shadow against the death moon.

  Hope stopped beneath the hole and looked at the wave of spiders closing in.

  “It’s madness!” she shouted. “Madness, that’s all that’s left for us now!”

  She thrust the disc-sword up into the dusk and felt it hit something hard.

  The spiders struck her, lifted her body, and light left her world.

  TREY COULD NOT sit back and do nothing.

  He lay flat on the ground and pulled himself forward so that he could see over the edge of the crevasse. The hole in the strange surface was alive with sound. Hope’s screams, the slapping of feet, the scraping of something metallic on stone…and something else. A hiss. A whisper.

  Trey grew cold at the sound, as though he were hearing the breath of a Nax. It can’t be, he thought. I smell no fledge. This is no fledge mine. It can’tbe.

  Hope came into view and looked up, and for a moment he thought she was yellowed with fledge. The death moon splashed on her upturned face and filled her eyes, and he drew back because that was a Nax she was running from, it had to be; he could hear it approaching even now. The terror in Hope’s drug-yellowed eyes told him that there was no hope at all.