Dawn n-2

by Tim Lebbon

  The ghost of the dead Sleeping God was chasing her all the way. She felt it on her back, crushing her down far harder than the measly weight of this shrinking girl ever could. Alishia was fading away, a barely noticeable bulk that Hope shifted from left shoulder to right. The Sleeping God…even its breath would have melted her into the ground. Its ghost, its memory, its unrealized potential, Hope carried all of these with her.

  Sometimes she thought she heard it scream.

  Hope moved on, climbing the first of the Kang Kang foothills. In all her time as a whore and witch she had never managed to secure a map of this place. It was mentioned in Rosen Am Tellington’sBook of Ways -and Hope owned one of the few remaining original copies of that tome-and yet even that great mapmaker had found these mountains obscure and unreadable. Some of those who claimed to have been here spoke of mountains and valleys, lakes and towers, holes in the ground and the ruins of races immeasurably old and forgotten. Others spoke of fields of snow and glaciers with no identifying mark between one place and another. Yet therewere rumors of a map…whispers of a man who had come out of Kang Kang millennia ago with the lay of the land imprinted on his mind…

  Hope believed none of it. Kang Kang was not a place to be mapped, nor even remembered. It was a place to avoid. Perhaps shades lived here, and tumblers, and mimics, and other things that no one should ever have to see. But this was not a world for people.

  “No people,” she said, looking up at the long slope before her. The Sleeping God watched her back and Hope spun around, Alishia’s weight nudging her off balance and spilling her to the ground.

  In the distance, two moons reflected from the stripped-stone landscape like a pair of staring eyes.

  “Leave me alone!” she shouted. “You’re dead and gone! Failed me, failedus, and now you’re just a fossil!”

  “It’s only in your mind,” Alishia said. The girl rolled away from Hope, sitting up and rubbing her shoulder where she had struck the ground.

  Hope looked at her suspiciously. “We arrive in Kang Kang and you wake up?”

  Alishia looked stunned. “We’re in Kang Kang already?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Where’s Trey?”

  Hope glanced away, trying not to look at the disc-sword she had dropped but failing. Alishia followed her gaze.

  “Trey?” the girl asked again.

  “He left us. Fled back underground. Found a fledge mine, smelled his damn drug, and he betrayed us.”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Betrayedyou!”

  “No,” Alishia said again, her voice gentle but firm. She stared at Hope, and the witch did not like those eyes.

  “We have to go on,” Hope said. “No time to sit and talk, things to do, a place to find, and you…look at you…you’re…”Is she really as small as I think? Hope thought. Or is this just Kang Kang trying to fool me again? She looks like a child. Or perhaps she’s far away.

  “I’m learning.”

  “Learning what?”

  The girl looked away, up toward the mountains they had to pass through.

  “You don’t trust me?” Hope said.

  “No.”

  Hope was not surprised. But neither, she discovered, did she really care. “It’s watching me,” she said. “The whole of Kang Kang, sitting here where it doesn’t belong, and it knows I’m coming and it knows you’re coming.”

  “I know,” Alishia said.

  “You know?” Hope stood over the girl, stooping to pick up the disc-sword. “What else do you know? What is it you’re learning? Is magic in you? Is it there now, ready to come back and fight? Give it to me!” She moved quickly, pressing the disc-sword beneath Alishia’s chin and resting her hand on the lever that spun the blade.

  Hope, you stupid whore, what are you going to do now? Kill the girl? Take away any chance, any slight hope you may have of becoming what you’ve always dreamed of being?

  “If you kill me, Noreela is dead.”

  “I don’t care about Noreela,” Hope said. She thought of the petrified heart of the Sleeping God, once filled with such wonder. “Noreela no longer cares for itself, so why should I?”

  “There’s more to the land than Sleeping Gods.” The girl was staring at her over the blade, no fear in her eyes.

  “What do you know?”

  “Some, but not enough.”

  Hope shook her head and stepped away. “I don’tcare!” she said.

  Alishia stood, and Hope saw how small she had become. She had the body and the height of a young teen, yet the attitude of someone with a whole world on her shoulders. Her eyes were those of someone ten times Hope’s age.

  “Come on,” Hope said. “The longer we wait here, the more Kang Kang can plot against us.”

  Alishia’s eyes drooped, she swayed, and Hope slapped her across the face. “Comeon!” she said. She grabbed the girl’s hand-it was hot, the skin of her palm bubbled as though burned-and pulled her up the slope.

  THE GROUND CHANGED, as Hope knew it would, and she saw the first steam vent. It was the height of her knee, and emitting an opaque mist into the night. She veered away from it, walking across the slope for a while to avoid its exhaust. Alishia followed blindly behind her. The girl was stumbling and dragging her feet, but still she walked on, tripping now and then and sobbing.

  Hope breathed in, felt the dry air turn warm and wet, and she had a brief, intense vision of a gigantic army marching toward a precipice a mile high. There were tens of thousands of soldiers there, many of them twice as tall as normal men, all wielding terrible weapons of death and destruction and illuminated from above by hovering globes of molten metal. She could smell the meat of them-rank and rotten, ready to be opened to the air-and hear their diseased breathing, and she had a very real sense that desperation drove them on. The cliff they approached was sheer, and she could see no way that they could climb it. From above, simmering through the night and making it suddenly daylight, great swathes of fire floated down and set the army alight.

  Hope gasped and fell to her knees, spitting bitter saliva from her mouth and turning back to Alishia. “Did you see that?” she said. “Did youtaste that?”

  Alishia was kneeling, drowsy and pale. “I saw something,” she said, looking around as though searching for a lost pet.

  “It’s Kang Kang tricking us,” Hope said. “Trying to frighten us, kill our hope. Showing us what will never happen.”

  “I think it’s already happened,” Alishia said.

  Yes, Hope thought, it had a tang of memory to it. She looked across the hillside at the flow of steam rising from the vent, slick like oil. A breeze whispered down from the mountains and the steam changed direction, but it danced with the breeze as though playing with it. “Let’s go on.”

  As they walked uphill they saw more of the vents. These were taller than the first, their bases thicker, the stream of substance pouring from their open necks wider. Hope kept as far away from the chimneys as possible, her breath so shallow that she became dizzy and disoriented. She waved the disc-sword around her head, shouting at phantoms, and she never let go of Alishia’s hand. If I let go she might blow away, she thought. She’s so small now, so shrunken. I can’t lose her. She’s my future.

  The funnels venting from beneath Kang Kang-a gassy drug, poison, memories-became less frequent the higher they climbed. First line of defense, Hope thought, and she waited for the second to appear.

  “What happened to your hand?” she asked. Alishia had gasped in pain whenever Hope grabbed harder to pull her on.

  “I’m learning,” Alishia said. Or perhaps she said “burning.” Hope was unsure, and she thought that repeating the question might give Kang Kang another small victory.

  THEY FOUND A ruin. It was a tower, upended and thrown back against a cliff of ragged stone. Its walls were cracked but still clung together, and its base sprouted into a tree of foundation; globes of footings, buds of ground piles. They defied gravity and threw a shambolic sha
dow against the cliff. Around the tower’s smashed head sat a jumble of giant rocks, as though the hillside had been impacted and shattered by something huge. One of the upside-down windows shone as the life moon reflected from some old thing inside.

  “No one said it was always this way,” Hope said. She paused a few hundred steps from the ruin and stretched, hands on her hips and shoulders pulled back. Alishia stood by her side, breathing fast, swaying.

  “This could be from before the Black,” Alishia said.

  “Could be. Or it might have happened yesterday.” But Hope could smell the age of this place, and when the moons struck the tower, it reflected old light.

  “I wonder who lived in there?”

  Hope looked higher up the ravaged hillside, trying to see where the tower had tumbled from. But it all seemed wrong. It had not fallen here, it had been thrown.

  “I wonder who died,” the witch said.

  “We should go on.” Alishia aimed east to walk around the tower and the shattered ground before it. Hope watched her go and suddenly wondered what would happen if she did not follow. She could go up and into that tower, make a home in its upside-down world and spend the rest of her time exploring its inverted history. Perhaps she would find something of significance, perhaps not.

  It’s of Kang Kang! she thought. Nothing good could have ever lived there. No calm hands laid those blocks, and no peaceful hand tore them down.

  Hope closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, and as she exhaled she knew that there was something extra to the air of this place. Between blinks-when she thought her vision of the world was negated-she saw more than ever. Perhaps it was one of the legendary Children of Kang Kang, this giant shape stepping in and out of the fallen tower, in and out, as though unsure where it would find its final rest. Its outline was formed from a dozen bodies twisted together, arms waving and mouths gaping, eyes rolling and catching the reflection of an ancient death moon, as if the wraiths of whole families clung together for comfort.

  Hope gasped and stepped back, keeping her eyes wide open. She hurried after Alishia, glancing at the uprooted tower as she went. When she eventually had to blink again, that shambling image was still there on the inside of her eyelid, weaker than before, fading with each successive blink, until those old wraiths were a memory once again.

  SOMETIME LATER -Hope had no idea how long, because time here was skewed-they came to a wide crevasse in the land. It stretched along the skirt of the first of Kang Kang’s true mountains, a river of darkness. They would have to cross it to continue their journey. That, or walk east or west until the crack in the world ended. Hope thought that perhaps it would never end.

  “It’s trying to stop us,” Hope said. She sank to her knees and dropped the disc-sword, pressing her hands to her face to make sure her tattoos had not entered into the betrayal. She felt them just below her skin, twisted into confusion and fear, and she could not deny them. “The whole of Kang Kang is after us.” She turned around and looked at Alishia where the girl stood behind her. Her eyes were hooded, their whites bloodshot and yellowed by the death moon. “Alishia?”

  “We have to go on,” the girl said.

  “Of course we do, but-”

  “There’s no excuse not to go on,” she continued. “We have to get there, I have to get there, and a simple hole in the world can’t stop us.”

  “I’ve been into one hole,” Hope said. She spat as far as she could, watching the spittle glint as it was carried into the ravine on the breeze.

  “There’s more than shadows down there,” Alishia said, and her voice was suddenly filled with such fear that the hairs on the back of Hope’s neck bristled.

  Alishia sank to her stomach behind Hope, pressing herself as flat to Kang Kang as she could. Hope followed her example. She tasted the grass of this place-bitter, as though its dew were blood-and smelled the ground, and she knew it was dying. Venting its memories. Giving them to the darkness as though it had no use of them anymore.

  “What is it?” Hope whispered, and the question could have so many answers.

  “Shade?” Alishia said. Hope turned around and looked at the girl, but she seemed to be unconscious again.

  The witch looked ahead, wishing she had some chemicala to light the way. But she had used the last of her tricks in the machine, trying in vain to save Rafe.

  She would not let them snatch magic from her again.

  How can I stop them?

  Kang Kang could do its worst, but she was attached to this girl as a mother to her unborn child.

  What can I possibly do to protect us?

  Whatever came up out of that ravine-and somethingwas coming, she was certain of that-she would fight it until her last spark of life guttered out.

  Because I’ve got nothing else left. Noreela is dead, but the girl can give me magic for the final days of my life.

  A hundred steps away a shape drifted up from the rent in the land, darker than the shadows around it and more animated. This blot of darkness had independent movement; it did not rely on clouds crossing moons. It twisted and writhed higher, and Hope averted her gaze.

  Shade? Alishia had said.

  Hope pressed her face into the ground and held her breath, eyes squeezed closed, skin creased, tattoos almost burning as they illustrated her terror like never before.

  She attempted to lose her mind. Ironically, mad as she surely was, her mind stayed with her, muttering its fears and suspicions. Much as she tried to drift away-to think of nothing-the here and now grabbed hold of her and refused to let go. Time had its claws in her, and it was slowly dragging her toward the gaping maw of its mouth. And it had teeth. Alishia fading away was one of them; this shade, risen from the ground of Kang Kang, was another. It must surely be of the Mages, and if it saw her, discovered Alishia, then everything truly would be over.

  Hope chewed at the grass, hoping that it might have some drug-like quality that would stifle her thoughts.

  She heard Alishia’s breathing behind her, fast and irregular as though something pursued her in dreams.

  The shade made no sound. It’s not of this world, Hope thought. Not even of Kang Kang. It’s from somewhere else.

  She lay there, not daring to look up in case the movement attracted the shade, and waited for the end.

  She waited for a long time. Perhaps she even drifted into an unsettled sleep, because for a while she was back in her rooms in Pavisse, fucking men and mixing herbs, telling fortunes and fulfilling deadly commissions. In all that sex for money, and poison for hate, there was an unbearable naivete that she so wished she could rediscover. She had been just another witch for so long, and finding that pathetic farm boy curled up in a doorway in the Hidden Districts had been the best of things, and the worst.

  She started whispering into the soil of Kang Kang, an old spell that her grandmother had once told her. It had been passed down through the ages from ancestors who had used magic for real, and though now its words were empty it had always held power for Hope. It was from this spell that she had taken her name, because uttering it was another expression of hope for magic’s return.

  Nothing changed. The words fell from her mouth and sank into the ground. And when she opened her eyes she was back on that bare hillside in Kang Kang, and the shade had gone.

  ALISHIA TRIED TO hide. When the shape had risen out of the ravine something shifted deep in her subconscious, causing her to retreat from the waking world and find her dreams again. She heard Hope’s voice coming from far away, questioning what she was doing and asking what sought them. As if she didn’t know. She knows far more than she lets on, Alishia thought. She doesn’t need me to tell her.

  In the burning library, she was no longer alone. There were no signs of an intruder, no smells, no echoes of something else walking these endless book corridors, and yet she knew that her mind was no longer all hers. Another presence was smelling this smoke from afar. Another consciousness perused these books’ titles, and Alishia had felt something li
ke it before.

  Shade? she thought. And then she ran.

  She had to hide. If the shade found her it would know her, and it would tell the Mages, and the time between now and the end would be short. With all the Mages’ might and armies focused on destroying what little Noreela still stood for, one single person stood a chance. But if the shade saw the taint of magic Alishia carried, the whole emphasis of this war would change.

  The burning library felt heavier and darker to her right, so she turned left, ducking beneath a tall book cabinet that had tilted to lean against another. She paused in there for a moment, wondering whether it would provide a safe enough place to hide. She ran her fingers along the book spines. Sixteen Heartbeats in the Fledge Seam, one was called. AndA Question for the Monk. AndOne Way to Appease the… The final two words of this spine had been scraped away, and the wound on the book looked new, the exposed card fluffy and white.

  Appease the what? Alishia thought, and the book burst into flames.

  From back the way she had come, she heard the sucking sound of flames being smothered. She ran. What smothers flames? Nothing. A vacuum. Emptiness.

  Turning left, right, trying to lose herself in the hope that she would lose the shade, Alishia thought of Trey and wondered where he was right now. She paused for a heartbeat to look at book titles, but they gave her no clues.

  Something’s playing with me, she thought. The idea that terrified her. This place was entirely random, a depository for every moment that ever was. And yet she had discovered that room beneath the library, books that related to her and those around her. And the woodland clearing; that wasn’t random. That was planned. Something’s steering me. Something’s alwaysbeen steering me, us, all of us. And it’s teaching me, and telling me, and making me know its language.

  Alishia reached a junction and turned left, changed her mind, headed right. And then she paused and attacked the book stack before her. Their pages fluttered as a warm breeze roared along the corridor. The sound of flames being drowned followed.

  It’s close, Alishia thought, and she scooped books from the shelves faster. Every binding she touched lured her in, but she resisted the temptation to pause and read. Though they might tell her much, their tales would hold her back, and then the shade would find her sitting among a stack of books, perusing the past of Noreela while it stole the future from her mind and took it away.