by Tim Lebbon
Most mornings she was woken by the horses stirring and shitting and being fed by Erv, the stable lad who had more than once tried to force his way into her room. She would stir slowly, listening to Noreela City waking up around her, smelling breakfasts cooking on iron skillets in the streets, tasting the rankness of the stale food she’d eaten the night before. Erv would talk louder than he had to and exercise the horses below her window when she was dressing. She always kept her knife close at hand. Erv was a nice lad on the surface, but his eyes shone with lawlessness.
This morning, however, something else brought Alishia from dreams of a field sprouting rotten corpses. She was glad to be awake, but for an instant she thought she was still in her dream. She could smell the acidic scent of burning. There was shouting coming from an unknown distance, the meaning of words stolen by street corners. But panic in the voices could not be disguised.
Instinct told Alishia that it was still the early hours and yet she could see around her room. Her clothes were in a careless heap on her chair, like a figure collapsed from exhaustion. She stared at them and they moved.
Her hand slid under the pillow so quickly that she pricked her finger on her knife. She yelped and fell from the bed, never taking her eyes from the shape on the chair, pulling the blade from beneath the covers and cursing when they entangled her hand, panicking and twisting the blankets more, expecting at any second—
But they were only her clothes, and the illusion of movement was given by the flickering light outside. The shifting, wavering light of a fire. A very big fire.
Alishia rushed to the window, completely forgetting her nakedness and the possibility of Erv already being in the yard below. The city glowed in the night, lit from the centre by a huge conflagration. It was not the location that convinced Alishia that it was the library. It was not even the disturbing events of yesterday. Ash revealed the unbearable truth. That, and the thousands of burning pages fluttering in the air like incandescent birds.
“No!” she said, instantly thinking of the man in red with the broken book beneath his arm. “Oh, no!”
Outside, fire turned the night-time streets to dusk. People bustled and hurried and there was a surreal, almost carnival atmosphere as Alishia pushed her way through the dawdlers and curious. Food vendors were hurrying toward the fire, pushing their carts before them, obviously anticipating a profitable day. Families were trailing along the streets, moving aside whenever a horse-drawn cart came by, babbling excitedly the nearer they came to the conflagration. Alishia tried not to cry but the smoke stung her eyes, so at least she had an excuse. Her rough cloth dress itched and scratched where she sweated, perspiration dripping with her tears to the old stone streets of a city that had been neither kind nor cruel to her, merely indifferent.
It seemed that this night, that state of affairs had changed.
As she entered one of the east squares and fought her way through traders setting their market stalls for the day, a cry went up. “Fire!” someone shouted, others echoed it, and Alishia almost laughed out loud. The column of smoke already reached the heavens, flames licked and danced at its base, and the stench of burning overrode even the warm tang of oiled spices and freshly squeezed rhellim. How could they only now acknowledge its existence? But then she saw the flaming stall in the corner of the square, and she understood. Before, the fire was little to do with them. A distraction, a novelty, something to chat about while they awaited their first customers of the day. Now it had touched one of them by sending down a flaming page from a book, kissing a stall covering alight, seeding itself away from the library. The threat of it engulfing all of their lives became immediately apparent. A couple of the traders rushed to help the frantic owner haul what she could away from the voracious flames, but most merely tried to protect their own stalls. They threw buckets of water across the canopies, packed away stock, calming their mules as best they could.
More flaming confetti floated down from the sky. Some of the little fires had burnt themselves out before they hit the ground, but a few—those feasting on a particularly rich history text, perhaps, or those with several pages stuck together by time—blazed into whatever they touched.
A man bashed at his own head to put out the flames in his hair. A woman squatted and pissed on her burning furbat. Novelty mutated into panic as the whole city seemed to speed up. Where people had been walking they now ran, where they’d been running they were now sprinting, whether towards or away from the fire. Water carts careered through the streets. Barrels bumped and spilled their precious cargo back into the gutter, and by the time Alishia had run to the fire there were already several wagons parked around the old, misshapen library building. Groups of sweating men and women swung buckets back and forth, fire glinting on their strained faces, skin seeming to stretch and redden even as they worked.
Hopeless, Alishia knew. All hopeless. There were a billion places for the flames to hide, and even if they did manage to douse the conflagration and drown it from the fabric of the building, the books would smoulder and simmer inside, the fire biding its time, ready to leap out and finish the destruction as soon as their backs were turned.
Why she personified the blaze she could not guess. It scared her at first, giving it a soul, an aim, a cruelty that she could barely comprehend. But then she thought of the man in red as he had left her library, the broken book beneath his arm, the torn and tattered pages he had been sitting amongst when she crept between the stacks to spy upon him. Nothing, he had said, but he had been lying. He had found something. And once that something left the library with him, perhaps there was no reason to leave anything else behind.
“You bastard,” she said as she watched the building burn. What right did he have to destroy history like this? “Oh, you bastard!”
The militia came, more to clear the streets than investigate the burning. Alishia told them who she was and they asked a few perfunctory questions. When she mentioned the man in red they seemed not to hear. They ushered the crowds away and left.
She stayed by the library for three days, watching as the building folded in upon itself, giant roof members exposed to the air like blackened ribs, only walking back to her room at night. Life went on around her, ignoring her grief. A man was sent from the Tumbling Window, but she barely registered the sound as he hit the ground.
On the third day a thunderstorm—mockingly late—extinguished the last of the smouldering ruin.
At last the librarian could pick her way into the rubble. There was very little left. Some of the book stacks still stood, but their contents were charred into one hard mass, knowledge petrified by fire. In there perhaps pages still read correctly, but Alishia could not find the will to go through every blackened lump, searching for whatever dregs of history may have survived. Instead she pushed them over and watched them crumble into black paste.
Crowds passed by the ruin with nary a second glance. The library was no longer interesting now that the fires had burnt down. Really, Alishia knew, no one had ever found it interesting.
Except for one man. An old man, so old that he should have been dead. The first dead man that Alishia had heard sing.
4
Rafe’s only sense was touch. He could feel the hands holding him down, the water sluicing his body, the rough scouring of something scraping across his stomach, his chest, then down between his legs. He struggled, but to no avail. He tried to open his eyes, thought he’d succeeded, but he saw only black. Either he was in total darkness or he was blind. He could not smell anything, and although the water trickled into his open mouth, there was no taste.
He was panicking but it seemed at a distance, a remote fear for the well-being of someone he knew only vaguely. It was a sensation he had felt before. When he was young he stole a bottle of rotwine from Trengborne's shop and sloped out into the fields with his friends. He felt big and brave, but within an hour of the first gulp he wished he had never even heard of the drink. He had often wondered why those men and women sittin
g inside and outside the tavern looked so lifeless, so devoid of emotion, and now he had found out. Everything receded until there was only fire in his veins, blurring the edges of his senses.
His father had found him and dragged him back to the house, sat up with him all night until Rafe came to and vomited across the floor. His parents did not tell him off. They said he had scolded himself, and that they hoped he had learnt a lesson.
His parents. They were kind and thoughtful, not impulsive and cruel like so many people he knew. They were also open and honest, and he loved them for that. Most people would have chosen never to tell their son that he was not truly their flesh and blood; that they had found him out on the hillside, a babe abandoned by rovers or a family too poor to care for another child; that though both as barren as some of the village fields, they had been so desperate to have a child that they had taken him and called him their own. Such honesty had troubled him at first, but in time it had made him love them even more. The trust implicit in their telling of the truth revealed the depth of their feelings for him.
And now they were dead.
“Dead!” he shouted, but hands pushed him back down as he tried to sit up, and he realised they were trying to help. The washing had stopped and now he was being dried with a rough towel, the cuts on his legs and arms stinging as clumsy but caring hands scoured them.
Rafe sat up again, pushing at whoever held him down. He touched his face to see if his eyes were open—they were—and the confirmation helped his vision creep back. With it came sound, and smell. He looked around, sniffed, and began to wish he was still unconscious.
The room could have been a slaughterhouse, or a refuse tip, or perhaps it had been used to house corpses during the Great Plagues and someone had forgotten to take them away. The stink of rotting meat was tremendous: a heavy, warm, sweet smell that twisted Rafe's guts into agonised knots and brought saliva to his mouth. He hated himself for feeling hungry. He looked around to try to find the cause of the stink, but he saw only the huge man who had been tending him. Perhaps, he thought, this person was the source of the smell. It seemed all too likely, judging by his appearance. Over six feet tall, all of it scruffy and filthy, a beard that housed tiny crawling things and arms so hairy that they looked like furbats attached to his shoulders. The man's face was scarred down one side, old whip-wounds black as death. Rafe recognised the signs of a tumbler attack from the stories he had heard back in Trengborne.
“Boy?” the man said, and it was as if the ground had spoken. His voice sounded like rocks grating together.
Rafe raised his eyebrows, too shocked to answer.
“Boy,” the man said again, smiling slightly. The smile tempered the voice and made it kind.
And then Rafe looked into his eyes for the first time, and he saw a cool, calm intelligence there, something belying his appearance. Rafe knew those eyes, recognised that intellect.
“Uncle Vance?”
“Rafe,” the huge man grumbled, “my boy, I haven't seen you for so long. What in Black's been happening? Why're you all bloody and cut up?”
“Uncle, they're dead,” he said. Actually saying it seemed to make it all final and real, and the dregs of unconsciousness flitted away to the corners of the stinking room. “All of them. Mother … father … everyone.”
“Royston? Dead?”
“Dead,” Rafe said again, and began to cry. He tried not to blink because every time he shut his eyes, images of his slaughtered parents came to him. But keeping his eyes open made him cry more.
Vance, his expression one of stunned shock, came to him and held out his arms, touching his lips with something cool and rank. “Best sleep, then,” he said, and before Rafe could reply sight, taste and sound faded out once more. The final sensation was his uncle's hand on his brow, shaking slightly as the big man shed his own shameless tears.
“He rode into the village,” Rafe said. “Then he killed everyone. And there was nothing anyone could do. The militia fought him, but he killed them. He had arrows in him and bolts and everything, but still he walked and killed. I watched him from the hills when I escaped … I watched him die, I think … but then I was followed. I think he's following me.”
“A madman. There are many of them nowadays.”
“But why kill mother and father? There's no rhyme, no reason.”
“People don’t need reasons,” Vance said. “They just need the urge.” He stared off into the corners of the room for a time, though Rafe was sure he was seeing much further. “Royston,” he muttered, and shook his head.
“How did I get here?” Rafe asked through their shared pain. “I don’t remember. I know I came down from the hills, there was something following me, but I don’t know how I found my way here.”
Vance looked up. “There was someone following you, but it was no madman. He brought you here after you collapsed in the street.”
“Who?”
“Some thief.”
Rafe shook his head, frowning.
Vance grunted. “He knew where I was, somehow. Said he'd been here before. Said he'd been most places.” He hawked and spat a huge gob of mucus onto the floor. “All the damn trouble there is in the world, and you get mixed up with a thief.”
“I wasn't mixed up—”
“I know, I know. That's not really what I meant.”
Rafe watched his uncle move across the room and open a cupboard. He brought out a bottle and uncorked it, slurping noisily as he downed half of its contents in one swallow.
“Aren't you going to tell anyone?” Rafe asked.
“Huh?” Vance's eyes were glazing.
“We have to tell someone.”
“Who?”
“I don't know. I have to go back, bury mother and father, do something … do something for …”
“They’d have been taken by now, by things. Night things. And Rafe, there's no one to tell. I could ride five days to Noreela City, and if the wraiths or tumblers or bandits didn’t get me first, and if they even let me through the city gates, they'd ask me why I'd come. Then they'd laugh and send me away again. Trengborne is an unknown little village in a big bad world. Nobody would give a Mage shit about what’s happened.”
“But everyone's dead!”
Vance stared, and Rafe felt himself shrivelling beneath that gaze. It held knowledge of all manner of things, and most of them must surely be bad. “Two moons ago, so it’s said, a village two days to the east—two days nearer Noreela City, mind you—was swallowed up. Sucked into the ground by a sinkhole. Everything mixed and blended into a soup. A thousand people. And you know what they sent from the city? Nothing. No help, no militia, not even a Mourner.” He looked at the ceiling, took another swig from the bottle and belched. “Everyone dies. It’s just that these days, people are doing it more often.” He drained the bottle and smashed it into a corner. “Nobody cares anymore.”
Vance found a fresh drink and virtually dismissed the terrified boy. In minutes he was drunk and dribbling, and a long hour later he was asleep.
Grief threatened to overwhelm Rafe, but anger held it at bay, or at least kept it contained. Perhaps shock was still shielding him from the reality of the moment, deadening what had happened. He shed more tears, held his head in his hands, and tried to remember all the good times.
Later, Rafe left the room and found his way out from the maze-like building. People were lying in hallways, asleep or dead. Rats rooted around and under them, crocodile beetles sought moist holes, and the slew of protection charms drawn on the walls in faded blood displayed a desperate, superstitious hope in a magic faded into myth. Rafe was not used to seeing such signs and they stirred something unknown within him, a memory that had never happened. He traced one sigil with his finger, and the dried, crusted blood scratched his skin.
The stink of his uncle's room seemed to have percolated throughout the whole building. Either that, or every room stank.
Rafe wondered who the thief could be. There was Kosar, the worker in T
rengborne, but they had never even spoken to each other. And surely he would have been killed along with everyone else.
He found his way out of the building. Weak sunlight greeted him and, though they were frightening and strange, he introduced himself to the afternoon streets of Pavisse.
He had heard much about the town. Some of it was hearsay, rumour passed through the young community of Trengborne and propagated by their desires of what the big town could offer. Some was from his parents, usually accompanied by warnings never to go there. It was a useless place, they had said, marked only by crime and badness, in dire need of rescue. Rescue from what they had never expanded upon, and neither had they explained their stern words of caution.
Rafe felt as if he was betraying his parents by even wandering the streets, but venting his grief in the presence of his drunken, frightening uncle felt worse. And it was such a strange and shocking place that curiosity got the better of him. Somewhere, perhaps that vague idea of help still existed … but it was a nebulous concept now, as distant as he felt.
Pavisse was a mining town first and foremost, and most of its inhabitants had something to do with working the ground. Groups of miners strode along the street, proudly wearing the unavoidable badges of their trade. Coal miners had leathery black skin and broad shoulders. They also bore scars and injuries from the many accidents and cave-in underground: missing limbs; empty eye sockets; faces cleansed of anything approaching joy. Those who dug fledge had eyes yellowed from their constant proximity to the drug, and bald scalps, a side-effect of its use. They were tall and thin, willowy men and women who twisted and turned their way through the many fledge arteries that networked the underground. They stared at something far away—memories of better lives perhaps—and to Rafe they looked like ghosts seeking somewhere to lie down in peace.
The miners had something else that set them apart, and it did not take long for Rafe to realise what it was. Three fledgers shoved him aside, walked on without giving him a second glance, and he knew then what he was seeing: total disregard for anyone other than fellow miners. Not just ignorance or aloofness: they could have been a different species.
