Dawn n-2

by Tim Lebbon

  Rocks ground together, wind drifted down from the mountaintops like bad breath and Hope walked on.

  She was changing shoulders more often, even though Alishia seemed to be growing smaller at an alarming rate. She was a young girl now, maybe the size of an eight- or nine-year-old. Her body had shrunk and changed, her face filled out and her skin was pale. The witch tried to dribble water into her mouth, but Alishia spat it out. She tried to feed her dried herbs from her shoulder bag, but the girl’s mouth squeezed tight, rejecting food. Perhaps food would make her grow again. Maybe growing younger like this was a part of what magic had planned for her.

  “Fuck fate,” Hope said. She shouted it again, hoping for a response from Kang Kang, but nothing came. Only the rocks grinding, and perhaps that was a language in itself. She listened for repetition in the noise, sounds that might signify meaning, but there was nothing. Could she really ever know the language of stones?

  Perhaps they’ll be there, she thought. Waiting at the Womb when we find it. Perhaps that’s why they passed us by…if I even saw them at all.

  As Hope reached the ridge connecting the first two major mountains of Kang Kang, standing in snow up to her calves and gasping the thin air as she tried to discern details of the landscape before her, Alishia started to speak. Hope could not understand, but she had heard the words before. She knew no meaning, but she remembered her mother and grandmother repeating them, passing them down through the ages even though their relevance had been lost along with magic.

  “Just where are you, librarian?” she said. She was suddenly afraid of this young girl. As Alishia regressed into childhood and whatever may come before, so she seemed to be taking on more of magic.

  Alishia spoke the language of the land, and they were words that Noreelan air had not heard in their full glory for three hundred years.

  HOPE FOUND A bush of berries, and even though some of them seemed to possess the features of small faces, still she picked and ate them. They burst in her mouth, releasing a sweet, warm fluid into her throat. They could be anything, Hope thought, staring close at a berry the size of her thumbnail. Poison fruit, chrysalis waiting to open…anything. She nudged one and every other berry on the tree swung in sympathy. She picked more and filled her pockets for later. Kang Kang just makes them look like that to put me off, she thought. She popped a few more into her mouth and crunched them between her teeth, feeling for movement that should not be there but finding none. She worked her shoulder to get Alishia into a more comfortable position and started off again.

  Hope headed into a valley where darkness seemed to lap at the edges. Moonlight did not find its way down here. She kept the disc-sword at the ready, squinting in the poor light to ensure she did not stray from the path. Even here it was still evident, and when she strayed she found that it was very clear which was path and which was not. Whilst on the path the noises she heard were subdued, the grumbling of Kang Kang talking in its sleep. But when she left the path and felt rough, virgin ground beneath the snow, the grumbling turned into a roar, and an avalanche of rocks came at her from hidden heights. She huddled down to protect Alishia with her own body, but when she looked up again the tumbling rocks had stilled, or vanished. The noise of their displeasure dissipated into the night, and she moved on.

  The route fell and rose again, finding the easiest way through the valley, up to the ridge and over into the next valley. The mountains weighed down on either side, but snow was coming in harder now, obscuring whatever the moonlight might betray of their mysterious heights.

  Time passed without measure. Hope melted snow in her hands to drink. The water tasted of something she could not quite place. She tried to drip some past Alishia’s lips, but the girl’s mouth pursed tight. Sometimes she sat on the path and cuddled the girl to her, crying and feeling tears freezing on her cheeks. She shared her warmth but received little in return: a sigh here, a whisper there. Occasionally Alishia would start talking again, those strange words unheard for so long, but their meaning was still inexplicable.

  She thought of the Mages perched atop their monstrous machine, heading south, deeper into Kang Kang. Not them at all, she tried to convince herself. They’d have seen us. They’d have killed us. Not them at all. An image from Kang Kang? Another one of its tricks? But not them…

  Perhaps she traveled for a day, or two days, or longer. The mountains grew higher around her and Kang Kang pressed in, threatening her with a thousand deaths that it seemed unable to deliver. “Is this you?” Hope would ask, but the girl never answered. “Is thisyou?” she asked what was inside the girl. But magic, as ever, was silent.

  SOMETHING CAME AGAINST them from the sky. It began as a heavy drone in the distance, turning quickly into a loud buzzing sound that seemed to confront them from all sides. Hope looked around in a panic, brandishing the disc-sword. The shadows appeared from the east, flitting in across the ground and casting themselves large with light from the death moon. Their wings blurred the air like heat haze. Snow was stirred up behind them, swirling in complex patterns. Alishia mumbled something and a strong wind blew up, originating somewhere far behind and below them and roaring up the valley. The flying things came closer, and Hope could make out their long legs and heavy stings, their wings, their heads dotted with a dozen eyes and trailing hair like an old man’s beard. The wind rushed past Hope and Alishia, passing by within a few steps of where they stood without disturbing a hair on their heads. It struck the flying things, swept them into the mountainside, cleared the ground of snow. The buzzing stopped, and the wind died away as quickly as it had come.

  Hope saw the broken bodies spilling steam. Some of them twitched, but none of them remained a threat. She turned and left quickly, thinking of magic, asking the question of Alishia yet again and receiving the same silence as response.

  She wondered how the Mages had extracted the fledgling magic from Rafe, and briefly considered whether it would work for her.

  And eventually she began to despair of ever finding the Womb of the Land. It was on the southern side of Kang Kang, she knew that…but how reliable could even that information be? It was a fact she had known forever but which she could not recall hearing or reading. How did she know? Was it part of the knowledge passed on from her mother, another witch who had never known magic? She consulted the Book of Ways several more times, but its pages on Kang Kang remained blank and useless.

  Her mind turned inward, obsessed with finding magic for herself and fulfilling her vapid life, and she continued following the path. We’re being protected, she thought. We’re being led. The Shades of the Land will guide us in.

  Tim Lebbon

  Dawn

  Chapter 17

  THE REMAINS OF the Shantasi army-those who had listened to O’Gan Pentle’s rallying cry rather than fleeing east-now traveled southwest toward the foothills of Kang Kang, and war.

  They moved quickly, many of them using their Pace and others riding beasts of the desert after feeding them Pace beetles. They maintained almost complete silence save for thehushing of thousands of feet. Here and there came the occasional clink of metals knocking together, but mostly the warriors had packed their armory perfectly, wrapping and tying and strapping it so that no weapon touched another. Those that did make a noise were probably the untrained Shantasi, the two thousand civilians who had remained with the intention of fighting rather than fleeing.

  The desert was a sea of dashing shapes and glinting metals. The life moon reflected from thousands of pale faces, and the death moon caught freshly sharpened blades and the tips of arrows and bolts. A desert beast died here and there, ridden to the end of its time by the determined Shantasi, and amongst the great swathe of footprints they left in the sand were the occasional humps of dead creatures. The Shantasi that dismounted would use their own Pace and run, or perhaps head off at angles from the army and catch fresh beasts.

  The smell of Pace beetles seemed to permeate the air around the army, and Kosar realized that it was the bre
ath of the Shantasi. He did not recognize the aroma-A’Meer had never smelled like this-and he could only assume that they had eaten fresh beetles to provide them with the boost they needed to travel so far.

  Kosar rode the same species of desert beast he and the Monk had ridden in on. Lucien sat behind him, bent low over the creature’s back. Kosar was not sure whether or not he was asleep, and he had no interest in finding out.

  Two Shantasi warriors-a man and a woman-held leather lines tied around the animal’s neck shield to guide it onward.

  Kosar was as amazed now as he had been five hours ago when they departed. It had taken an incredibly short time for the army to amass, and soon the desert between his resting place and the failing swathes of desert spice was filled with Shantasi, resting after their run from Hess or helping with the gathering of Pace beetles and other things. Even then they had been quiet, their subdued talking amounting to a background murmur that fought the slight breeze for greater volume.

  “These are all warriors?” he had asked.

  “Most of them,” O’Gan said. “There are many more, but they went east when the Elders…”

  “Panicked?”

  O’Gan had not replied.

  With the Shantasi still coming in from the east, O’Gan Pentle had stood on a rock on the hillside and issued a rallying call that had Kosar in tears. Here was a man, he realized, who had been forced into being a general. A man who, though he was a Mystic and a seer, had always relied on those above him to make such monumental decisions of life and death as he now faced. The fate of Noreela was on his shoulders, and it was a heavy weight indeed.

  As Kosar had watched him climb onto the rock, he thought, He looks so weak. Slow. Beaten already. But then O’Gan stood, lifted his head and smiled. And in that one expression Kosar saw no consideration of failure at all.

  He had told his people of the threat they knew, and the many likely dangers they did not. He beseeched them to stand firm and strong. They were the slave race, he said, and the greatest vow any Shantasi could make-to the people, or to him- or herself-was to never be a slave again. The Mages were enslaving Noreela and its people. They would imprison their bodies and steal their minds, kill their children and destroy the culture the Shantasi had built up for thousands of years. And in the end, they would wipe their history from New Shanti.

  We are the triumph of our ancestors, he said, and the memory of our descendants. Let us make it a proud memory. One of forbearance and determination, rather than submission and slavery. Today, fight for tomorrow, and make tomorrow thankful.

  The assembled Shantasi had cheered-one long, loud exhalation that echoed from the low hills and seemed to set the dying spice farms swaying on their massive frames. And then they had begun their journey, with O’Gan and senior members of his army planning as they moved.

  Kosar was becoming travel weary. He had been on the move for so long that he craved a day and a night in the same place. Though it had been a comparatively short time since the Red Monks had invaded Trengborne and set everything in motion, the period between then and now seemed even longer than those decades he had spent wandering Noreela as a thief. I’ve done so much more in the past few days, he thought. Lost a lover, lost my friends. Lost so much. What drives me on? Why is this so much to me? It disturbed him that he could not answer, but he did not dwell on the question lest the true answer distress him even more.

  Lucien had not spoken since setting off. He had settled down, resting forward on the creature’s back, and a couple of times Kosar wondered whether the Red Monk was dead. But when he turned around he could see the Monk’s hands moving, fingers fisting and unfisting as though trying to grasp something from the air as they moved.

  We’re running toward a battle, Kosar thought. He had A’Meer’s sword strapped once again to his side, but what could that do against the Mages and their army? What was a sword against magic? He was terrified. He did not understand what still drove him on, and the idea of dying in the foothills of Kang Kang was terrible to him. Not there, he thought. I don’t need to die there. He needed to save his death for somewhere else.

  He had seen the Mages without their dark magic, and they had been terrible. With magic? He could hardly bear to imagine.

  Several groups of Shantasi parted from the main army and headed north into the desert. Each group comprised half a dozen men and women, and they ran as fast as they could out across the sand. They disappeared quickly into the dusk. Kosar watched them go, and jumped as a voice spoke up beside him.

  “We’ll be within sight of Kang Kang soon,” O’Gan Pentle said. “We’ve been making plans, but it’s difficult without knowing where the Krote army will arrive. We can’t dig in. We can’t sit and wait. We have to maintain mobility.”

  “Take the fight to them,” Kosar said.

  “And what if they pass us by?”

  “I know where they will enter Kang Kang,” Lucien said. Kosar and O’Gan exchanged glances; neither of them wanted to look at the Monk.

  “Where?” O’Gan asked.

  “North of the Womb, of course. That’s where the witch and the girl will be going, and that’s where the Mages will send their army to follow.”

  “I can’t trust you,” O’Gan said. “You’re a Red Monk.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Lucien said, lifting his head and sitting up for the first time. “Do with it what you will.”

  “Let him speak,” Kosar said. “His cause is our cause right now, you know that.”

  “He killed A’Meer,” O’Gan said. That was cruel. He held Kosar’s gaze.

  “He killed her when our causes were conflicting,” Kosar said.

  “You trust the Monk?”

  “No, but I trust in his obsession. And he’s never told me a lie.”

  O’Gan steered his creature away for a while, conversing with several running Shantasi in their clear, clipped language. Then he moved back alongside their mount. “So tell us,” he said, looking ahead.

  “I know only of where the Womb is supposed to be: in the southern reaches of Kang Kang, but close to this end. North of there is where the Krote army will try to enter, if they know of the girl by now, that is. If not-if their cause is still the destruction of New Shanti-then we’re going the wrong way.”

  Kosar turned and searched for a glimmer of humor in the Monk’s face. He found none.

  “We have our scouts,” O’Gan said. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  More Shantasi veered away and headed north. “So what are they harvesting?” Kosar asked again.

  O’Gan rode ahead and called over his shoulder, “I told you: weapons.”

  LATER, WHEN THE first hills of Kang Kang appeared in the gloom to the south, they paused for a rest. Kosar and Lucien sat beside their ride, watching the Shantasi slumping to the ground, glugging water, chewing on dried meats and panting at the cool air. Some of them steamed. No fires were lit and no camps were set, because they all knew that they would be moving on again soon. A few glanced at Kosar and the Monk, but they looked away quickly. Most of the warriors seemed absorbed in their own thoughts.

  So like A’Meer, Kosar thought. He was watching a female warrior, taller than A’Meer had been but possessing the same long hair and sharp features. She checked her weapons while she ate; drew her sword, pricked her finger and resheathed it. She was unaware of Kosar’s observation and he felt like an intruder, but there was something about the unconscious grace of her movements that gave him comfort. She was confident and assured, at ease with her weapons and unquestioning of the task they had been set. Kosar looked down at his hands and gave the warrior her brief privacy.

  O’Gan came to them, flanked by several Shantasi, who glared at Lucien with barely disguised hatred. Have they come to kill him? Kosar thought, and he was surprised at the panic he felt.

  O’Gan knelt beside Kosar. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  Kosar shrugged, trying not to wince at the pains from across his body. “Fine,” he said. “
Never better.”

  “Good. I want you and the Monk to go south with a complement of Shantasi into Kang Kang. We’re splitting in two: two thousand will remain here, awaiting the word of scouts and ready to move wherever necessary to ambush the Krotes. The other two thousand will go into the foothills, spread out and hide. If they get through us, they’ll have another surprise awaiting them when they enter the mountains.”

  “How do you know we’re at the right place?”

  “I don’t,” O’Gan said. “But the going ahead is tough. A scout returned and said that twenty miles from here, the land has been stripped bare as far as she could see. Down to the bedrock. Not an easy route for whatever machines the Krotes may have.”

  Kosar nodded. “You’re staying here?”

  “I will lead the First Army. I assumed you and the Monk would want to accompany the Second. And if he…” O’Gan looked at Lucien and started speaking to him. “If you really know the location of the Womb, it would be best for you to be with the Second Army.” The Mystic shook his head and looked down at the ground. “Who knows what may happen if they break through to Kang Kang? There are so many factors unknown: we don’t know where the girl is, whether she’s still alive, whether she and the witch even know where the Womb is. We know so little.”

  One of his commanders spoke in Shantasi, and O’Gan looked up again. “He’s asking whether you can fight.”

  Kosar nodded. “I’ve learned a lot.”

  “Good. Well…” He raised one corner of his mouth in a sad smile.

  “Thank you for believing me,” Kosar said. “It doesn’t feel quite so hopeless.”

  “You’re a liar,” O’Gan said, but his voice was light. He looked up at the darkened sky, then north toward where the Krotes might soon emerge from the night. “I never thought it would come to this,” he said. “The bulk of the Shantasi fleeing. We were always the strong ones. If only we’d stayed together…if the Elders had faced their fears…” He looked away, shook his head, perhaps embarrassed at saying so much in front of this stranger. Then he looked directly at Kosar, and fear and doubt were obvious in his eyes. “We have absolutely no idea what we’re about to face,” he said quietly.