Dusk: a dark fantasy novel (A Noreela novel)

by Tim Lebbon

  “Woken by what?”

  Trey grasped his knees and squeezed, as if trying to wring out the truth. “By whatever’s happening up here. Anything that wakes them up means bad times falling on us, always. Just never this bad. In the past, there was only ever one at a time…” He trailed off, tracing the pattern of his tears on the dry grass, as if communicating through the language of the mines as he spoke. “Sonda,” he whispered. “Mother.”

  Alishia rigged a sun screen with her blanket and some broken branches from a nearby tree, and went about preparing some food. Trey remained awake and silent. Occasionally she heard a sob from him, but she left him to his mourning, travelling some way along the slope as she searched for wild potatoes.

  What she had read about the Nax had always been written as myth, grand and great stories with which to frighten children or startle susceptible adults. She had never read a serious book where there was anything more than a passing reference, supposition dressed as fact, and she had always assumed that the Nax were mostly make-believe. But then many people believed that the Violet Dogs were imaginary as well, a dread tale of invasion and slaughter dreamed up generations ago to fulfil some political or religious agenda.

  “I thought the Nax were a legend,” she said quietly as she approached Trey. She dropped an armful of wild potatoes and began chopping them into a bowl with a pinch of herbs.

  “They are,” he said. “They were. Everyone down there believes in them, but there’s little proof, little to tell the truth. Moments in history, but history is easily distorted. They’re our gods and our demons.”

  “All gods and demons make themselves heard or felt from time to time,” Alishia said. She cursed inwardly, stunned at her clumsiness in conversation. This poor man was mourning his mother’s death, and the deaths of those he knew and loved, and here she was spouting her naïve librarian’s philosophy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean—”

  “No,” he said. He was looking at her properly for the first time now, holding the blanket above his eyes to shield them from the sun. “That’s all right. I’m sorry I said you were a little girl. I can see that I was wrong.”

  Alishia turned away, blushing. She felt so inept. She was not used to talking to people, especially strangers.

  Especially fledge miners!

  Trey Barossa ate little, and after food he thanked Alishia and said that he needed to sleep, to travel, to warn …

  She watched confused and fascinated as the miner took a chunk of fledge from his shoulder bag and chewed it as his eyes closed, his breathing slowed and his body seemed to relax, moulding itself to the ground. She sat nearby and looked back across the plains at Noreela City. It was still visible in the distance, a bruise on the land with a brown haze of smoke marking the sky above it. The city was less than a day distant, and yet it already felt a lifetime away.

  Later she wandered over to the sleeping miner and gathered his things. His shoulder bag fell open. She caught sight of a lump of yellow fledge within.

  Alishia looked back at the city again. More than a world away.

  It did not take long for Trey to drift away. He felt the heat of sunlight on his skin, even through the blanket the girl had erected above him, and he smelled a hundred smells he did not know, heard wind brushing through nearby trees, felt the cool smoothness of grass beneath him, a thousand experiences he had never known living underground where the air was cool, the cavern filled with man-made smells, and the breeze came from deeper within the caves, bringing only rumour. He should be revelling in this place. There was so much to see, yet he had barely opened his eyes.

  But sleep was welcoming for him, and the travel that came with it. He had to move his mind across mountains, try to touch the awareness of miners further away, deeper down. He had to warn them.

  The sounds and smells faded as sleep took him, and Trey rode the power of the fledge. He moved away quickly, shifting straight up into the air like a cave bat gone wild, flailing invisible limbs to try to regain a sense of balance. His mind spun, and with it his perceptions. Up and down ceased to exist. There was simply around: an all-encompassing awareness of being surrounded by space, unhindered by rock, a million different routes open to him from where he hung, unplanned, unrestricted. Trey’s mind exulted and rose higher, touching clouds that tingled his skin and made him shiver where he slept on the hillside far below. Shapes circled him for a while, black birds with cruel curved beaks, and he was aware that they had something of the talent he possessed. They knew of his presence, though they could not see him. They circled some more and Trey shifted away, watching as the birds dipped and rose, trying to find him again. They called out and he heard them twice, up here in his mind and down below with his sleeping man’s ears.

  He felt more free and unimpeded than ever before in a fledge dream. The space around him was staggering, the potential overwhelming. He wished Sonda could have experienced this; he wished that they could have been here together. But Sonda was dead, slaughtered by the rampaging Nax.

  Trey tried to rein in his mind and steer it across the mountains. He passed between peaks, dipped down to touch a tumbling stream that came from deep within the mountains, wondering whether it was connected with the underground river that had played the background to his life forever. He went farther from his body than he ever had before. The distance was frightening—he could feel the space between his conscious mind and his subconscious—but it also felt safe. It was no wonder, as his mother had once told him, that so many of the fledgers who visited topside decided to stay forever. Up here there was such freedom.

  He passed the cave and shaft in the hillside where the rising had brought him to the surface, raging and mad with grief, sending him out blind into this new world. The rising had halted in its tracks. Way down below, the mules were dead.

  Trey moved on, eager to put distance between himself and that evidence of his former life. He flew into the mountains, passing a small lake speckled with signs of thousands of fish breaking surface. A scar on one hillside told of a recent landslide, and the ground revealed below glowed and glittered, as if the blood of the land was drying in the sun.

  Onward, further into the Widow’s Peaks. On one steep slope he spied a herd of creatures rolling uphill. He moved closer and made out something of their make up; they were like shifting plants, great balls of growth that hauled themselves effortlessly against the slope with barbs and hooks and sharps stems. Closer still, and then the whispering began. Deep down in his mind voices rose up, some in languages he could not understand, a few relating words he could. There were many whisperers, and although Trey was sure they were not actually directing their speech at him, he felt exposed and vulnerable floating high in the fresh mountain air. He went even closer and the voices grew louder. Their whispers were rhythmic and spellbinding, drawing him in. He tried to make out whether they were talking in pleasure or pain, glee or grief, and when he saw some of the shapes decorating the outsides of these tumbling things—the flash of bone, old cloth flapping as the things moved, the occasional damp darkness of rotting things—he realised whose voices they were.

  He rose quickly, escaping this band of things as they tumbled inexorably uphill, and within minutes he was out of range of their muttering victims.

  Trey flew on until he found what he was looking for; a wound in the land, a mine shaft, cauterised by time and continuous usage. There was no evidence of any sort of rising here. A huge machine sat dead and pointless way beyond the mouth of the shaft. Great chains, links as long as a man, lay rusted into the soil, mostly overgrown but visible here and there as a reminder of old times. They connected the redundant machine with whatever means had once been used to haul the mine’s product to the surface.

  He dipped down, hovered at the mouth of the mine and took a mental sniff. It was fledge, but old, little sign of any new batches of the drug having been brought to the surface in a while. He drifted inside, immediately finding the going harder now that he was confined
once again in tunnels and shafts. He stopped suddenly, his incorporeal self standing at the black entrance to some unfathomably deep pit.

  Out of the darkness came silent screams.

  Trey reeled, spun back, passing into rock and out again, his movements slowing, and for a few rapid heartbeats he was terrified that he was becoming stuck down there, caught in the sickening outpouring of pain and agony, trapped in the knowledge that slaughter was happening at that exact moment. The mental anguish poured up and out like an eruption of pure torment, scalding him where he lay.

  Somehow Trey withdrew from the mine. He fled into the sunlight, letting its heat bathe the screams from his floating mind.

  Alishia drank wine, sometimes. Nothing else. She had certainly never tried fledge.

  She knew of some who used it, and she was more than aware of its effects: nullifying, dulling, somnambulistic. In her readings about the fledge mining communities that had existed for generations below ground there were hints at its spiritualistic properties, the idea that its real use was as a perception-expanding compound than a mind-numbing drug. She had been drawn to the conclusion that its effect depended largely upon the user, what they desired from the drug and what drove them to sample it.

  She was sure that she had nothing to fear.

  The chunk was the size of her little fingernail, surely not enough for the sleeping miner to miss. She sniffed at it, enjoying the sweet aroma, and dabbed it to her tongue. The taste sat in her mouth and then seemed to spread, sinking through her cheeks and across her face in a warm, glowing sensation. It was nice. The sun did not change, the landscape around her remained unaltered; there were no adverse effects.

  Trey had chewed a lump of fledge the size of his closed fist. Surely a negligible piece such as this would do her no harm? She was an explorer now after all, and as Ro Sargossa had written, experience is the mother of knowledge.

  She glanced at the sleeping miner. He had shivered a few times, moaned in his sleep, groaned once or twice. He seemed calm now. She looked up again, across the plains at Noreela City. Even in the warmth of the afternoon sun that place seemed cold and distant, like a memory cast in heat haze instead of a real place.

  Alishia lay down on the grass and chewed the fledge into dusty fragments.

  She did not travel, but she did dream.

  Alishia dreamed of secrets. She knew many supposed secrets, gleaned from the books and maps and diaries and other ephemera she had read through her life, but she did not understand them. To her, they were simply knowledge. So much of what she had read was forgotten, lost in the mists of time and degradation since the Cataclysmic War. The words she had read changed now into pictures, the pictures into rich images, the images into dream memories: the Violet Dogs stormed ashore in a time gone by, screaming and whistling and eager to consume; a man passed a box beneath a table, inside the box a charm, inside the charm a spell of death, and the fate of a long-dead Duke was sealed; a soulless shade cried in the dark, a place without sun. There were many more, dreamed together into a miasma of experience which Alishia thought little of knowing. In her fledge-fuelled dream these things simply were.

  Erv was there in her dreams, so awkward and pathetic and far less frightening. He was the guide walking her from one image to the next, holding her hand like the Duke guiding a Duchess down a dangerous path. There was no real threat here; he was Alishia’s idea of what he always should have been. There was no surprise when she told him she loved him, because maybe in a much different world—a world where safety was assured, not craved, and where people lived instead of merely existed, with time for leisure and pleasure instead of filling their hours with the fight for survival—maybe in that world, it could have been so. Alishia’s dream-land made that world, speckled as it was with the precious yet deadly stones of arcane memory, her naiveté finding succour in the fact that perfection could still exist above and around all the things she knew. Terrible things, some of them. So terrible, so heinous, that their memories had been all but lost, locked away between dusty age-yellowed covers and buried in the deepest piles of books. History, befuddling itself with terrors of the present, had no real import for people fighting day to day to stay alive. The austerity of Alishia’s existence made her a natural receptor for such knowledge.

  She passed from one time to another, one place to the next, distance proving no barrier, though time was spelled out for her. Shifting from three centuries pre-Cataclysmic War to the first few years following that dreadful event was exhausting, as if for a few seconds she herself had lived those times. She toured the deserted battlefields of the Cantrass Plains and the islands of The Spine, seeing the giant war machines already rotting into the poisoned ground, sensing the skewed influence of the Mages as nature struggled to right its wronged self.

  More time passed. Alishia’s dreams continued, laying her knowledge out for her own inspection. She was aware of the astounding passage of time, and also the meagre couple of hours she had spent sleeping on the foothills of the Widow’s Peaks. She was content in the knowledge that she was safe.

  But things were changing.

  Because as dream-Erv loved and guided her around the labyrinthine landscape of her own understanding, Alishia sensed something impenetrable in the distance. Past the realms of her own mind and intelligence, way beyond knowledge, a black space had opened up in her mind. She understood its emptiness. She understood that it was a potential nothing, not even a nothing itself, less substantial than total darkness which was merely an absence of light. And for the first time, she was afraid.

  She turned her back on this inscrutable absence and tried to walk away, but Erv held her back. He had changed, now. He was no longer the innocence she craved, the naiveté she admitted, even to herself. Now he was something else entirely.

  Something came out of the dark.

  Alishia screamed herself awake. She had not cried out like that since she was a little girl. It hurt her throat, terrified her. In the distance a rage of skull ravens took flight, and nearby the fledge miner rolled from his front onto his back and sat up, looking around in obvious distress.

  Alishia immediately knew where she was, but she could still feel that impenetrable nothingness seeking her out, searching across mountains and through valleys for her vulnerable mind.

  “All gone,” Trey muttered through a slew of tears. “They’ve come and taken them all.”

  They’ve come … Alishia thought, and although she had stopped screaming, her fear was just as rich and bright.

  The questing thing was a dream memory, fading as the hot sun sought to burn it away. But that did not soothe Alishia. In the comfortable, passive landscapes of her memory, something had actively opened its eye and seen her, something hiding away in a place she thought was safe.

  And now it was searching her out.

  10

  The shade was building on instinct. Experience was not yet available to it, but knowledge and, more importantly, understanding increased with each successive moment. As a thing of prospect and latent existence it craved a fixed point of reference, something it could home in on and investigate, examine, with a view to making its own. Let loose by its god, the shade’s potential was staggering, an all-enveloping pressure that required expending and exercising.

  It knew whispers, but none of them hinted at the object of its search.

  It dipped more frequently out of the planes bordering existence, and the shock became less intense each time.

  Time and distance juggled with the shade, shifting it by esoteric travel until it sensed a true solidity around it, the material of reality, where the inanimate and the long-dead swarmed with teeming life. Here, the shade knew, it would find a home.

  Twisted as it was, any home would suit. It was stronger than a shade should be, more capable in its potential madness, more able to drive out a previous life to make room for its own pending existence. And it could do that here, a tumbling mind in a valley, alone and free, seeking something enriching; or there
, a great consciousness floating much as itself, old and wise but perhaps too removed. Because whatever actions the shade took were informed by its god. It could lose itself, find a permanent place and plant its seed of wrongness, but that would mean betrayal. And if it weren’t for its god, it would not even exist as it did now; it would be less than nothing, a total absence of potential, memory and intent. At least now it knew of itself. Given success, the rewards from its god would be greater still.

  So the shade passed by a multitude of hosts, dipping past some and causing brief frisson of fear, ignoring many more. Searching. Seeking the perfect home. Hunting for a place where whispers were rich and rumour was rife. Here it would create itself at last. And when the time came, it would return to nothing.

  The shade felt fear at that, a vague emotion filtered down like a whisper from the future.

  And then suddenly it found what it sought. There were many minds displaced and it passed them all—most were tired and introverted and alone. But this one … this one soared. It travelled in memory and revelled in knowledge. It hunted new ideas, not content to make do with the old. It was a mind that knew the potency of the past and the promise of the future.

  The shade noticed it, and the mind was aware of being noticed. It was rich and wide, and suddenly the shade knew emotion—real fear, real freedom—and it lurched. Its own would-be mind stumbled away through the darkness, and when it settled the mind it sought had withdrawn, back down into the world of reality.

  The shade was not concerned. It had dipped out to the world many times now, and it was no longer afraid. It would seek out this mind and find room in there for itself.