by Tim Lebbon
Nothing can touch them, she thought. The Mages, with all their dark magic and three centuries of hate, they can’t touchthem!
The male Mage turned and stared directly at Hope. His eyes were blazing red coals, narrowed to slits. His mouth opened and displayed long teeth, made longer because his gums had been burned away. He growled, and it rumbled from the earth and into Hope’s bones like an earthquake.
She closed her eyes again. And now he’ll turn on me. Something warm touched her face and scalp, and for a second she thought that he was at her, hot breath caressing her as he decided how best to kill. But then she realized that the heat felt good, and familiar, and the one word echoing in her mind as she opened her eyes again wasAlishia!
KOSAR PARRIED THE Krote’s first sword swipe, ducked below the second, and then the land began to bleed.
“Alishia!” Kosar shouted. He looked to the east, and the foothills of Kang Kang were silhouetted against an orange and red sky, their slopes and peaks cut in stark relief against the lightening sky, and the glow was spreading up and out like a growing bruise, seeping through the Mages’ dusk from the ground up. Smudged lines of sunlight stretched across the landscape, reached at the sky, probed behind the mountains.
And then, like a giant birthed anew from the fading land, the curved head of the sun started to rise.
Cheers rose across the hillside, and the noise of battle lessened as warriors-Shantasi and Krote alike-paused to take in the incredible sight.
Kosar glanced at the female Krote. She was watching as well, and the amazement on her face slowly melted into what could only be relief. The fresh sun stroked across her scarred scalp and bloodied shoulder, and her few remaining teeth glittered as she smiled.
Kosar looked to the east again. He felt the fledgling heat of the sun on his skin, and it was like dipping into a warm bath. Wisps of fine cloud scratched the sky red. It was the most beautiful thing Kosar had ever seen.
“You’ve lost,” he said. “Your filthy Mages are dead, and you’ve fuckinglost!”
“So magic me away,” the Krote said. But Kosar could see the strange look in her eyes-part confusion, part relief-and when he raised his sword again she merely glanced at it before turning away.
A hundred mimic soldiers melted back into the ground. The surface flowed northward, down the slopes of the battlefield and out onto the long plains that led toward whatever was left of Noreela. Kosar mourned their passing, but he realized that their purpose was fulfilled. What happened to the few hundred remaining Shantasi, and their Krote enemies, was of no concern to the mimics.
“Going home?” Kosar shouted after his enemy. “Fleeing again?”
The Krote turned and stared at him, and Kosar began to regret his words. “I have more things left to do,” she said. She gazed around the field of battle, the piles of bodies, the shambling dead and weary living, the Krotes and machines, the Shantasi cheering here, regrouping there, all of it now lit by the sun rising triumphant. “Do what you will. My time is moving on.” She mounted her machine and sent it a command.
Kosar screamed at the Krote, “I made you fall!” She glanced at him again, dismissive, then rode away. He threw A’Meer’s sword. Its bloodied blade glowed red in the sunlight as it spun at the Krote woman’s head. It hit her neck and bounced off, rattling from the back of the machine and dropping beneath its stone legs. She did not even turn around. The machine stomped on the sword and moved on.
As the Krote and her machine seemed to shimmer away down the hillside, Kosar realized that he was crying.
KOSAR PICKED UP his sword, amazed to find it undamaged even by that monster’s weight. Unlike Lucien. He felt little at the death of the Monk; no sadness, and certainly no delight. Lucien had killed A’Meer, but her murderer had been a Red Monk, not a man. Perhaps sometime in the future Kosar would have time to dwell upon what that meant.
He went to war again. With sunlight flooding the hillside-its heat and rays fresh and energizing-the fight became that much easier. The Shantasi used the confusion of dawn to regroup and change tactics, forming into four large circles, fighting their way up the slope. There were more pallid wolves to send against the Krotes, and a dozen young grinders were attached to machines confused by the dawn. They chewed and melted their way through stone and metal alike, eating out the hearts of these unnatural constructs.
The Mages’ warriors lost something as day dawned. Whether it was a true sense of purpose or the confidence of victory, their fighting became less effective. Conversely, the Shantasi had gained so much more. These were the inhabitants of New Shanti that had refused to flee. These were the warriors and farmers, the poets and carpenters who had taken up arms against the aggressor, instead of following their Elder Mystics’ lead and accepting defeat. It was confidence that fueled them now, and perhaps a hint of pride in knowing what they had already achieved. Both gave them strength and grace.
In between attacks, the Shantasi glanced skyward and smiled. The warm sun-free of Kang Kang now, and rising confidently above Noreela once more-smiled back.
There were no more serpenthals to aid their fight. The surviving tumblers had also disappeared from the battle, rumbling east and west along the mountain range. Many remained on the plains, the smoke of their pyres forming a dirty brown cloud that drifted slowly to the east.
It quickly became apparent to the Krote army that this was not their hour. Some of them turned and fled back to the north. Others dropped their weapons and stepped forward to surrender, a sense of weary relief on their faces. They were cut down by the Shantasi. This was not a battle where mercy held much meaning.
Kosar fought on. And hours later, as the sun peaked and scorched any remaining shadows of dusk from the land, he felt an urgent calling from the south. Alishia, he thought. Trey. Hope. He had been away from his friends for too long. He needed to know whether any of them were still alive.
HOPE WAS WHISPERING to the ground.
The words she used were old, and to many in Noreela they would have no meaning. But she came from a long line of witches, both true and false, and a witch could never forget the language of the land.
She spoke to the soil, stroked the grass, glanced up at the sky yet again to see where the darkness was being eaten away by the sun. She buried her fingers in the soft ground and touched the roots of the grass. She felt things down there caressing her fingertips, cold and old.
Her tattoos widened across her face as her mouth fell open, and suddenly she knew.
She rubbed her hands together and pooled magic in her palms. She laughed, sniffed her fingertips and smelled way past the soil, down to the depths of magic and what it could do, what itwould do. And she realized just how blinkered the Mages had always been.
When she stood, she knew that they would be close. The female Mage was tall and thin and beautiful, but such beauty remained far from her eyes. The male was still ruined from the fire. In the sudden daylight, his scorched black wounds were grotesque, but his eyes were bright and undamaged, glittering orange as though still filled with the fire that should have killed him.
“Hello,” Hope said. She laughed again, and it felt good.
“I know you,” the male Mage growled.
“I don’t think so,” Hope said. “I’ve fucked a lot of people in my time, and I’m sure I’d have remembered someone as ugly as you.” She was completely unafraid, even though she knew that this would end in her death. Her life might stop here, but it was complete, fulfilled, and she felt the true blood of her ancestors coursing through her veins for the first time. I could heal his burns, she thought. I could see her future, I could cast myself from the here and now, pass through the land and arrive wherever I wished. I could do all that and so many other things, but the first is something I owe. And I owe so much to so many.
“You mock us?” Angel asked.
“Mockery is no answer to evil,” Hope said.
Angel spat. “Isee you! You’ve got evil hiding in you, just as surely as you have tho
se markings on your face. Shall I pull them? Rip them out to see what they drag from your depths?”
“I can live with my own wrongdoings,” Hope said. “But don’t you see what else I have?”
“You’re a witch,” S’Hivez said.
Hope nodded.
“A witch,” Angel said. “How cute.”
“You’ve lost,” Hope said.
Angel frowned and S’Hivez glanced at the sky.
“A brief setback,” Angel said.
“No,” Hope said, shaking her head. “You’velost. And you never even knew how to win. You ply your bastardized magic, but true magic is the language of the land. You never knew how to listen to it. And you willnever speak it.”
“And you, a sad old witch with no magic, can say this?”
“Oh I have magic,” Hope said quietly, and she muttered words from ancient memory.
The ground below the Mages split open. They shouted in surprise as they fell, trying to cast some dark spell at Hope that fizzled to nothing. Angel coughed a blue fireball that sputtered out beneath the strengthening sun. S’Hivez threw a shock wave that parted around the witch and killed trees, flattened grass. Hope muttered a backward phrase and the shock wave reversed, slamming into S’Hivez, knocking him back, and behind her trees came back to life and grass stood up.
Hope felt the limitless power of the land thrumming inside. Her heart thundered in her chest, blood pumped so fast that her eyes and ears began bleeding again, but the pains were all good. They were good, because they meant that she was doing something right.
When the hole was deep enough to cover the Mages, Hope reversed her words, and the stone sides began to close in.
Angel rose, levitating from the hole, but Hope smiled and the Mage fell back down. S’Hivez screamed, and deep below his feet a cave opened up, rock crumbling and soil pouring in.
Hope frowned and spoke faster.
The stone sides of the hole were crushing Angel now, but S’Hivez, much of his frame stripped of flesh, scurried down into the cavern beneath his feet. His last look he spared for Angel. Hope could not see his eyes, did not catch what passed between them, but as the female Mage started screaming, S’Hivez slipped away.
She felt the Nax return to the valley before she saw them. She cringed, their senses existing for a few heartbeats in her mind. And then two of them whipped past her and darted into the crack, passing Angel and disappearing after S’Hivez.
Angel screamed. For a moment Hope considered mercy. The ground was closing in slowly on the Mage, pressing her face against rock, gripping her torso and legs and head, and the scream was one of true agony. But there were only three more words left to say.
Hope looked to the sky and spoke to the new daylight.
Angel’s screams were cut off as the sides of the hole met. A weak blue light sizzled across the ground and faded away. With one final crack, the top of Angel’s skull popped up, and a flow of brain matter sparkled in the sun as it pattered down across the grass.
Hope closed her eyes and the noises came to an end.
“Lost him,” she said. “After all that, I lost him.” But with the Nax on his trail, the escaped Mage would not survive for long.
A while later she lost so much more, as she knew she must. The magic leeched away, leaving her an old false witch once again, but this time she was no longer sad. Alishia had planted the seed of magic and it had lent itself to Hope, just for a while.
Someday soon, the seed would bloom.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 23
THE KROTE MACHINES had already started to die.
Most of the surviving Shantasi went north, pursuing the fleeing enemy and preparing to meet the future waves of Krote warriors that must surely come. There would be more fighting, for this war was far from over, but at least now it would be on equal terms.
Fifty warriors went east, back to New Shanti, where they would arrive victorious, ready to gather and lead the full might of New Shanti’s army north to aid the rest of the land. There would be issues to resolve, and blame to be meted out. But the politics would wait until after the Krotes were once again driven from Noreela.
Kosar persuaded a Shantasi captain to lend him twenty warriors to take into Kang Kang. None of them were keen to go, but they were buoyed by the sun’s reemergence, and many of them had seen Kosar with O’Gan Pentle. The thief had taken on something of a mystical quality himself.
THEY TRAVELED FOR a day and a night, camping deep inside Kang Kang and lying awake, listening to noises that none of them knew and imagining creatures that no one had ever seen. The next morning, tired and drained, one of them almost put an arrow into Hope when she wandered into their camp.
KOSAR AND HOPE sat away from the Shantasi, cooking a rabbit over an open fire and drinking water.
“It’s not so bad,” Hope said, nodding up at the mountains. The peaks were smeared with snow, the lower slopes wet with rain. The sun had risen again that morning. Kosar would never take the dawn for granted.
“The tumblers helped us fight the Krotes too,” Kosar said. Hope had relayed her story in one long talk, staring into the flames, stroking and sniffing her fingertips. Kosar had touched his own fingers-brands sore from the fighting-and listened.
“Did you see the Nax?” Hope asked, eyes wide.
Kosar shook his head. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t there. It was confused. And when dawn came, it got more confusing still.”
“How so?”
“Some Krotes fought on, some didn’t.” He thought of the scarred female warrior riding away, saying that her fight was moving on.
They ate the rabbit in companionable silence, both so loaded with questions that neither really knew where to begin. At last, the beast little more than bones in their hands, Kosar asked the question.
“Where will you go?”
He saw how the witch had changed. Her tattoos were still there, forbidding and angry, but a darkness had lifted from her eyes. For the first time ever, her name seemed to suit. “Back through Kang Kang,” she said. “I’ll avoid the Womb of the Land, though I doubt I’d even find it again. And then, into The Blurring.”
“But there’s nothing there,” Kosar said.
“How do you know?”
“Well…”
“It’s called The Blurring because it’s never been mapped,” Hope said. “And if the male Mage does manage to evade or defeat the Nax, that’s where he’ll go.”
“What makes you think that?”
“His ex-lover is dead, his magic weakened, and when whatever Alishia planted is birthed, it’ll be driven away completely. If I need to, I’ll be able to fight him on equal terms. He has nothing left to live for, but somehow I don’t think an old monster like that will lie down and die. So, my guess is that he’ll go south. Away from everything.”
“Toward nothing.”
“Maybe. But if he survives the Nax, I’ll follow.”
“Why?”
“Magicchose me, Kosar! Just for an instant, but itchose me. And now I owe…so much.” Hope licked meat juice from her fingers. “Besides, who knows what’s there? I heard rumors that a mad Sleeping God is awake down there. And other stories, all of them fantastic. So much to see and discover. And I don’t think Noreela’s for me. I did things…I hurt people…” She did not finish, and Kosar did not wish to pursue that route.
“You?” Hope asked. “Where are you going?”
Kosar raised his eyebrows and smiled at the witch. “In all honesty, I hadn’t even thought about it.”This is when she asks me to go with her, he thought. But the witch stared back into the flames, a strange look on her face.
“Well…” she said.
“Well what?”
“Kosar, while you’re thinking about where to go, I can do something for you. You’ll maybe hate me for this. I wouldn’t blame you if you did, but I can do this now, and I want to, and I insist you let me.”
“What the Mage shit are you ta
lking about, Hope?”
“Give me your hands.”
“Why?”
“Those brands. I can cure them. If you’ll let me.”
Kosar looked down at his bleeding fingertips, made more raw since dusk fell. He had a dozen other wounds on his body, but now these seemed to hurt the most. “How long have you known you could do this?” he asked.
Hope looked away. “Quite some time.”
“Oh.” He fisted his hands, but remembered the change he had seen on her face. And it was no longer the time for hate. “Here,” he said, and he showed her his fingers.
LATER, HOPE WRAPPED his brands with strips of cloth torn from her already ragged dress. The Wilmott’s Nemesis root was burned and powdered, and she told him to keep the wrappings on for two days. “False magic,” she said, smiling at him.
“Not for much longer.”
Hope wrapped the last finger. “It’ll stay sore for a while,” she said, “but the bleeding should stop soon, and they’ll have a chance to heal. Try not to aggravate the wounds. No wars for a while.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I can do those as well.” She touched Kosar’s neck. He had almost forgotten about the wound there, pulled shut by sand rat teeth.
“Lucien did that.”
“A Red Monk stitched you up?” Hope pulled the teeth out one by one, dabbed Kosar’s throat, nodded in satisfaction. “He did a good job.”
“There was so much more to him,” Kosar said. He touched his throat and winced.
After a pause Hope asked, “So have you decided?”
He shrugged. “I’m a wanderer,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll just wander and see where I end up. But first I have to visit where A’Meer died. Maybe I’ll find her wraith. Maybe I can chant her down.”
