by Tim Lebbon
His moonlit journey across Lake Denyah had been strange. He had heard things he had never noticed out there before: creatures surfacing, hissing at the sky and sinking down again beneath the waves, leaving the spicy stench of something unknown drifting across the lake’s surface. None of the rising things seemed interested in him. One emerged a hundred steps from his small boat, a black shiny shape. He stretched out low in the boat so that he did not offer such a large target-joints complaining, old bones wishing he were still at rest in the Monastery-and watched over the gunwale as the serpent twisted and wailed like a pained wraith in the moonlight. The life moon sheened its oily skin, stroking head to tail as it raised various parts of itself from the water. Then it floated on the surface before sinking slowly beneath, leaving barely a ripple to hint at its existence. Jossua sat up again, staring after the serpent, and he knew why he had never seen its like before. That was not something of the Mages or the new magic, but it wasa thing coveting darkness. A creature of the night previously hidden away from the sun, emerging now because of the constant twilight. The Mages’twilight.
Perhaps there will be more.
He had continued on across the lake, sailing when the winds were in his favor, paddling slowly when they were not. He was a very old man, and he expected his heart to give out at any moment. But he was resilient. He had seen and been through much more than any other Monk alive, and experience had hardened his shade like petrified wood. His bones might be weak, his skin thin and his blood like water, but it was his single powerful obsession that drove him on. Even in this dusk, when color all but bled from the world, he knew that his face was a bright, angry red.
After Lake Denyah, he had entered into the mountain range of The Heights, a place that harbored many small, isolated settlements. The people who lived here rarely left, and knew little of what was happening elsewhere in Noreela. Jossua had not been here for over a hundred years.
The Heights was where he found the first body.
At first the corpse was simply a shadow amongst shadows, blending into the shaded landscape like any other rock, tree or deserted dwelling. But then the shadow showed its first hint of red.
The settlement he was passing through revealed signs of having been abandoned in a hurry. Front doors were hanging open, the streets were strewn with clothing, and here and there he found rotting animals that had been left tethered to stakes in the ground. He could make out the shape on the foot of the hillside now, distinct from other shadows, a shape he should recognize…
Walking through the village, he looked for clues as to what could have made the people flee. There was no indication that they had been attacked: no arrows in timber walls, dropped swords, bodies cleaved in two. There were no bodies at all, other than those of the trapped animals.
And that one ahead, on the hillside, something gleaming in one hand.
Jossua paused at the edge of the village, trying to gain a sense of what had happened. If there was danger in The Heights, he should know it for himself, because he had a long way yet to travel. Far too long, he thought, but he cast that idea aside. He had not been more than a dozen miles from the Monastery for decades, and now here he was embarking on a journey of three or four hundred.
I’ll be like that, he thought. That dead thing up there on the hillside. Left to rot into the ground. Purpose unfulfilled. My life ended as uselessly as it began.
He could still recall parts of his first journey across Lake Denyah, the glow of the Mages’ terrible power scorching the horizon, and the hundreds of people around him who would be dead within hours. Three hundred years ago, more lifetimes than he had any right to have lived. Yet here he was still breathing and thinking, and he had always believed there was purpose in that.
He always believed he lived for something more.
As soon as he left the deserted village behind, he knew that he was looking at a Red Monk.
Her hood had been torn away, along with most of her robe. The exposed skin was dark, and made darker by huge rents in her flesh. Dried blood was black in the moonlight. She had lost one arm and most of her other hand, her left leg was shredded like a gutted fish and her face was a mess of broken bone. The remnants of her hand were still curled around the hilt of her sword.
Jossua knelt beside the dead Monk, reached out, touched the back of her neck. He moved her cold head from side to side and lifted her hair. He was trying to see what had killed her.
Some of the wounds were from swords or slideshocks. Others were less easy to identify. The terrible trauma to her foot seemed to have been inflicted by something multibladed, or perhaps by teeth.
“What have you been through?” he said. But she had no answer, so Jossua stood and moved on, leaving the dead Monk to rot into the hillside.
He worked his way through the valleys of The Heights. He had neither the energy nor the inclination to climb mountains and traverse ridges. The valley was shaded from moonlight for much of the way, carved over time by the small rivers and streams that started high up and flowed eventually into Lake Denyah. He took water from the streams, rested by the rivers, and all the while he was amazed by the utter silence of this place.
Last time he was here, the mountains had been alive with noise. He hid himself away up on the mountainside, finding a small hollow in the ground sheltered from above by an overhanging rock and concealed from all sides by a growth of thick yellowberry bushes. From there he watched and listened, content to observe events rather than be a part of them.
Skull ravens had buzzed him, cawing into the sky as they touched on his mind and turned away. People worked on the valley floor, tending crops and hunting, building homes and damming streams to form fishing lakes. Their cattle bayed, wolves howled, children ran and laughed and screamed, and late at night the adults would sit around the village perimeter and light fires, keeping the darkness at bay and talking quietly amongst themselves. There was noise and activity, and Jossua had remained in his hiding place for seven days watching the village go about its business. The mountains were never silent. At night there were animals abroad, and the land itself seemed to breathe. There was still a rhythm to things even then, two hundred years after the Cataclysmic War had plunged the land into decline. The rhythm was upset on occasion, and the land sounded like an old man’s breath on his deathbed…but there was always more than silence. Perhaps it had been the sound of plants growing and dying.
Now the permanent twilight had started killing the plants. The inhabitants of these places had fled, and whatever once lived on the mountains seemed to be still, or dead. Magic’s withdrawal had mortally wounded the land; it seemed that it had taken magic’s reemergence to finally kill it.
A couple of miles farther on, Jossua found two more Monks, both of them dead, both bearing horrendous wounds similar to the first. He barely paused. He had known once the sun failed to rise that the Monks’ cause was at an end, that the Mages had returned to claim magic for themselves. And he had known what this would mean.
But seeing the results of defeat was harder than he could have imagined.
HALF A DAY later he saw another Red Monk. This one was still crawling.
Jossua paused for a moment, unnerved by this, the only living thing he had seen in over a day. Perhaps deep inside he had decided that he would never see a living Monk again. Days spent making his way across Lake Denyah and through The Heights had engendered a sense of isolation, which finding the Monks’ corpses had only exaggerated. Now something else was moving in this valley floor apart from him.
He knelt, tilting his sword so that it did not drag against rocks. The injured Monk was a hundred steps away, crawling so slowly that movement was barely visible. Jossua had spent long nights watching the moons vie for space in the sky, and he had often tried to discern their movements, wondering what it could mean that he only made it out if he closed his eyes for hours at a time. He had once believed that it displayed his disassociation from nature, an inability to perceive the tides of time which mean
t that he was remote from the land’s true beat. Events of great consequence shifted with the speed of a waning moon, and Jossua missed it all because he did not have the ability to see.
He looked at the ground by his feet, trying to decide whether the shapes and shadows of moonlight in the loose shale meant anything other than twilight. He shifted one stone with his foot and nothing crawled from beneath its shielding mass. He moved another and it hid only damp darkness. The shadows were motionless.
When he looked up again, the Monk had moved a step or two, one hand reaching out as if to grab water from the stream still a dozen steps away.
“You’re still alive,” Jossua whispered, not knowing what this could mean.
He approached the Red Monk. It was another woman, robe badly shredded and stained with blood and the muck she had been crawling through. There was little left of her face. Bubbles of blood formed where her nose had once been. Her hand clawed at the ground, found a hold, then pulled. The fingernails had been ripped out. She pushed with her feet. Her other hand was crushed and stinking of rot, and Jossua could make out fresh blade wounds where she had tried to amputate.
The bad hand would poison her blood, and she still had many questions to answer.
“Lie still,” he said. The Monk lowered her head to the ground and sighed.
Jossua raised his sword and brought it down just above the elbow of the damaged arm. He severed the limb with one strike, and the Monk twitched once and whined, the sound fading to nothing as her body grew still. He kicked the stinking arm.
Jossua knelt and turned her head. She still had one good eye, and he drew close and stared into it.
“I am the Elder Monk,” he said. “You must not die yet. I need to know what happened, and where, and when. You need to talk to me now.”
The Monk opened her mouth and hissed. Her tongue, gray and swollen, scraped at her teeth, flexing aside as she tried to speak. “Wa…wa…”
“Water,” Jossua said. He refilled his canteen from the stream, returning to the woman and letting a few drops touch her lips and enter her mouth. She barely moved, though her tongue writhed like a fat slug.
“Tell me,” he said. “Where have you come from?”
The woman took several deep breaths and pushed herself onto her side, looking up to the sky as though searching for the sun. “I saw the sun set,” she said, “and it never rose again.”
“Where was this?”
“Machines…graveyard…a place where they died, but I saw them live again.”
“And the Mages?”
The woman closed her eyes. “Took the boy from within a machine. Took him away. Darkness remained. That, and slaughter.”
“Where was this?”
“Gray…Woods.”
Jossua frowned and knelt back, trying to conjure a map of this part of Noreela in his mind. The Gray Woods lay to the east, a strange place bordering the Mol’Steria Desert. He had never been beneath the influence of their canopy, but he had heard the stories.
“You crawled that far?” he said. It was impossible. This woman would be dead within hours, and not all of her wounds were old and putrid. Some of them were new. He touched her chest and smelled his hand. Fresh blood, not rank.
The Monk shook her head, and her whole body started to jitter against the ground.
“What?” Jossua said. “What do you have to tell me?”
“Taken!” she suddenly screeched. “Taken and dragged andshredded!” Her good eye opened wide. It caught the death moon and shone yellow, echoing its shape and size in the sky.
“A tumbler?” Jossua asked.
The woman shook her head and snorted. Perhaps it was meant to be a laugh.
“Then, what?”
“No tumbler,” she said. “Monster. God. Demon!”
“But it let you live.”
The woman frowned and rolled onto her stomach, gnawing at drooping heathers.
“It let you live,”Jossua said. “Why?”
“Elder, we’ve lost,” she said.
“Do you have a message for me?”
“We’ve lost, we’ve lost…” She twisted her head, small stones crunching between her teeth.
Jossua stood. “That is no message at all.” He swung his sword and cut off the dying Monk’s head. For a second her jaw still worked, and he wondered at her final thought.
He left the body to cool and walked on. Monster…god…demon! He looked up at the hillsides and along the valley, but then went back to staring at the ground a few paces ahead. If something came at him from the dark, perhaps it was best he did not know until it arrived.
Then perhaps it would give him its message in person.
JOSSUA HAD THE stolen page from the Book of Ways in his pocket, ready to be referred to once he reached Kang Kang. Though even reaching that place was not a certainty.
He passed through the heart of The Heights and found more abandoned settlements. He discovered other things too, which he knew were signs of the land’s continuing decline. In one valley, a small forest had sprung up alongside the river. The trees’ leaves still shone bright and healthy in the moonlight, though they had not seen the sun for several days. As he drew closer, Jossua realized why. He had believed they would offer shelter for a camp, and perhaps food for his supper. But he wanted none of this fruit.
Wrapped in each trunk was the body of a small child. It was as if the children had been held there while the trees grew around them, and now they were part of the trees, their arms and legs jutting from the bark in imitation of the great limbs sprouting high above their heads. The trees pumped blood and the children seeped sap. They must have been old, though their flesh was still pink and ripe, and their eyes glittered in the moonlight, following Jossua’s progress as he paused and slumped slowly to the ground. Their mouths hung open, though no sound escaped their petrified throats. He could see the whites of their eyes like the inside of a burst wellburr seed. But these were like no trees he had ever seen before.
Jossua was tired, his old bones ached, his shoulder hurt from wounds received long before any of these children were born…and yet they disturbed him. There was something powerful about their stares, as though they knew much more than he, and he had to walk around the small forest and leave the valley before he could sit and rest in peace.
Monster…god…demon!
“Where are you?” he said to the night. “Come out of the shadows. If you’re demons, I’m just like you. If you’re gods, I won’t believe until you show me. If you’re monsters…well, I’ve taken meals with worse than you. You can’t bother me.” He thought of the mad Monk’s fear as she had spoken, and those fresh wounds cut through others gained days before in the Gray Woods. “You can’t bother me,” he said again, but repetition added no strength to the words.
Walking on, Jossua looked up into the strange twilight. No stars, no clouds, only moonlight smearing the heavens and battling for supremacy. The life moon seemed to be rising still, the death moon lower in the north, yet the color that persisted was the pale yellow of old fledge.
And at the thought of that buried drug, Jossua’s next breath brought a hint of its spice to his nose.
He paused and looked around. No fledge mines in The Heights, he thought. He snorted to clear his nose and breathed in again, but this time the scent was absent. Yet there was something in the night, a consciousness colliding with his own but trying not to make itself known. He looked left and right, searching for a sign, a shifting shadow or the glitter of unknown eyes watching from the vague distance. Nothing…and yet for the first time in days, he no longer felt alone.
He stood and spoke into the darkness. “If there’s meaning here, let me know it now. If this is just something looking for dinner, I’m old and tough, and I won’t go down without my sword opening you from arse to mouth.” Nothing responded, nor came at him from the shadows. He breathed in and sensed no fledge, and cursed his aged nose.
It was there, he thought. Just for an instant, but it was
there. Because there were no fledge mines in The Heights did not mean that there was no fledge. It could be buried in deep veins never before found. Or perhaps fledgersdid know of its existence but for some reason had decided not to mine here. It was possible that a whiff of the buried drug would make it topside on occasion, especially in times as strange as these. I’m fooling myself, he thought. I’m making up stories where there are none, and making excuses for things I can never know.
Jossua walked on, glancing behind now and then, certain that there was now something else alive in The Heights other than him and those monstrous trees. The ground was breathing again, processes were no longer ended. But not all that lives is good.
Monster…god…demon!
“I think I know you already,” he said. And even Jossua’s bad old flesh felt a thrill at such presumption.
SOMETHING HAD BROUGHT those wounded Red Monks to The Heights. They had fought a battle in the Gray Woods-a fight that had involved the Mages and stabbing, clubbing things that could only have been machines resurrected from their deaths. They could not have come this far on their own, not bearing such terrible injuries. And something had given them fresh wounds bringing them here.
“A sign for me,” Jossua said to the dark.
An hour later he saw another Monk, his body wrecked with terrible wounds both old and new. He put him out of his misery without asking any questions.
I’m following a trail, Jossua thought, and the message will lie at its end.
IT TOOK ANOTHER day to leave The Heights and find the end of the trail. Jossua guessed at the passage of time, estimating it from the periods between food and toilet rather than anything to do with the sky. Time was paused for Noreela, and it was only inside that Jossua felt it moving on. I’m too old for this, he kept thinking. The idea seemed to provide the impetus to go farther.
He saw three more Monks, two of them dead. The living one was sitting against a rock beside a dry riverbed, holding his sword in both hands and staring ahead as if challenging the death stalking him. His wounds were many, but most of them were old. He had lost a lot of blood but retained his red rage, hood still raised, robe pinned to his body by several snapped blades.
