Dusk: a dark fantasy novel (A Noreela novel)

by Tim Lebbon

  Thus ended Lenora’s journey from Noreela as a Krote of the Mages, and began her time on Dana’Man as one of their lieutenants. The time of the Cataclysmic War was over, and the beginning of their three hundred year exile was beginning. Magic had gone, though sorcerers like the Mages always had something about them. Chemicala, some said, tricks available only to those with the knowledge. But Lenora always believed that they had held on to some of the effects of magic, at least. They had been too wrapped up in it—and it in them—for all effects to vanish in that one instant.

  Angel had given her endless life, after all.

  Drifting down to sea level, spying the faint haze of Noreela on the horizon, Lenora thought only fleetingly of her three hundred years on Dana’Man: finding the old civilisations there; the slaughter and enslavery; the eventual changing of each tribe to live the way of the Krote. That seemed more like ancient history than even their rout from Noreela beforehand, a brief, motionless interval in the long story of the Mages. A story in which she had become a major part.

  As she led the first assault on the giant land of Noreela, and a new age began, she heard a shadowy voice at the back of her mind. As yet she could not make out what it had to say. But there was plenty of time.

  Lucien Malini left Pavisse on the fastest horse he could steal.

  Behind him, the remaining Red Monks spread north and east from the town out across hills, through valleys, scouring forests and ravines, hamlets and farmsteads, searching desperately for the fleeing boy. They knew that if he and his band reached Noreela City they would be lost; they could go to ground there and remain hidden for weeks, and in that time the boy’s curse would be working its way out, filling him and spilling eventually to offer itself up again for abuse. Common folk of Noreela would welcome the magic back into their hands, but so would the Mages. And this time—Noreela’s armies too weak to fight, its people apathetic—the Mages would have their way. There would be no rout. There would be no repeat of the Cataclysmic War. There would be true cataclysm.

  The horse pounded across the foothills, Malini urging it on, plains and woodland to their left and mountains to the right. As they skirted an old swallow hole the horse stumbled and almost spilled Lucien to the ground. He hung onto the animal’s mane, gripping with his knees, glancing back at the hole in the land and wondering how many more were waiting beneath the surface. Perhaps they would erupt and conjoin in one final explosive event, swirling the whole of Noreela into a giant whirlpool of earth and flesh, mountains and cities, people and dreams. The land was fading fast—he had travelled far, he had seen it all—and the Monks knew that its eventual demise, or a transmutation into something else entirely, would be the only final outcome. That saddened him, but it pleased him too. It meant that the Mages would be defeated forever. With no land there was no magic, and with no magic … the Mages would rot their lives away, unfulfilled, powerless, their evil fragmenting into eternity.

  That thinking did not detract from his aims today. The future was a shy place, and it might be far different from how any of them imagined. The Red Monks believed in the final cataclysm, but there was no guarantee, no sure way to confirm their beliefs. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen a thousand years from now. However soon, now that magic was bleeding back into the land they had to fight to keep it from the Mages’ hands.

  He was riding for the Monastery. The rest of the Order had to be warned that magic had returned. It had gone far beyond those few Monks who had searched through Pavisse, the one that had died in Trengborne without killing the boy. Rafe Baburn was young, naïve and inexperienced, and he should have been killed long before now. Three Monks dead already—each worth a dozen men in strength and tenacity—and still the boy ran, accompanied by the Shantasi and those others that had taken to his cause. Lucien did not mourn the dead Monks, but their failure rankled. This should have been finished already. And he knew that the more time passed and the more powerful the boy became, the more likely it was that the Mages would hear of magic’s re-emergence.

  There would be no recriminations, no blame, no reprimands; the Order was too mechanical for that. The fleeting idea that one of them should have ridden for the Monastery days ago, when they first got wind of the magic in the boy, flashed across Lucien’s mind but he pushed it down. The rage had been upon him. There had been no reason to believe that the boy would survive.

  So he rode, heading south for the monastery on Lake Denyah. Night fell and he spurred the horse on, riding by the light of the death moon. Howling things closed in on him and veered away again, smelling his rage and the heat of his hate. Heading away from the boy only kindled his hatred more. The horse stumbled and fell, tipping Lucien onto rocks, but he shrugged off his smashed shoulder and remounted, kicking the horse into a gallop once more. His shattered bones ground together in concert with the horse’s snorting. Blood clotted around the bones, easing them apart and stiffening his shoulder into a solid knot of scar. In one small valley he rode through decay, a place where the ground itself had died and was slowly rotting away to the bedrock, giving off a gaseous miasma that caught the moonlight and kept it for itself. Wavering images passed through. Lucien rode through the souls of the land, dispersing them, feeling their coolness, grinning as they tried and failed to freeze his blood. Wraiths called to him in the night but he ignored them, unconcerned at such nebulous entities. His mind was focussed on two things: the future, the magic, the return of the curse that had ruined the land.

  And reinforcements.

  Part II

  Sunfall

  19

  Death began as a dust mote in his eye.

  Jayke Bigg rubbed at his eyelid, blinking fast, thinking that perhaps the sea breeze had blown grit along the beach and into his face. He looked down at his feet and lifted his eyelid, giving his tears a chance to carry the offending grit away, seeing the broken shells scattered across the sand and wondering if anyone would ever see them again. And the dust in his eye, intruding into his senses like an uninvited ghost, where had that come from? A splinter of stone from a statue to some forgotten god? A shard of bone from an ancient sea creature, long gone and unknown to anyone alive today? Jayke was prone to such musings. Being alone at Land’s End made them inevitable.

  He sighed, held his hand palm-up before him and stared at it, shifting his vision left to right. There was nothing in his eye. Perhaps it had been an illusion. He looked north again, at the place he was always meant to watch, and the sun shimmered the horizon into haziness.

  Jayke resumed his stroll along the beach. He came down here from the cliffs every morning, leaving the old stone house that had been bequeathed him by his parents and theirs before them, enjoying the freedom of the wilds. He felt at peace most in the morning, when the sun rose from the end of the beach and the day’s worries and loneliness were still coalescing from the remnants of his dreams. Ring turtles flapped their way back into the sea further along the beach, their eggs safely buried once more, and Jayke took his time walking that far. He wanted them to be in the sea and away before he dug up one of the nests and took the eggs for breakfast. He knew how they would taste: salty; mysterious; filled with tales of the seas that he could savour, but never know.

  Gulls called from above, perhaps afraid that he would scale the cliffs and steal their eggs as well. Cave snakes sang from small holes low down in the cliffs, serenading in the new day before they slithered back into darkness to sleep the sun away. Bubbles the size of his fist blew in the sea-smoothed sand, exhalations of things buried deep.

  Jayke paused and looked north again, an unconscious action that he probably performed a thousand times each day. It was as natural as the beating of his heart. This place was a dividing line between worlds, a true wilderness, where the known world of Noreela ended and the unknown, endless North Seas began. It had always been a wild place but, ironically, safe as well. He was here to keep watch for the direst danger of all.

  Jayke could not recall any real threats for him and h
is parents in all the years they had lived here. There were natural dangers, true: storms throwing gigantic waves at the cliffs; the extremes of weather through the seasons, crushing them with snow and baking them with sun; an occasional sea tiger, stalking from the waves and sniffing around their home, its tentacles never happy until they entwined around some warm, living meat. But no threats or malign influences.

  Jayke reached the place where the turtles had spent the night laying eggs. He glanced to the north again, then bent and burrowed into the disturbed sand. He found five eggs, flaccid leathery sacs that would harden in his oven and taste wondrous with sea-salt and lashings of soured sheebok milk. He stood, pocketed the eggs, turned back the way he had come, glanced north—

  And there it was again, that speck in the sky that he had thought to be windblown dust. He paused, held his breath, looked slightly left and right … and the speck remained in the same place. Just above the horizon, shimmering in the morning heat-haze, a smudge on the clear blue sky.

  Oh, no.

  Birds, perhaps? A flock of gulls?

  It couldn’t be.

  Too far out for gulls. Too steady.

  Eyeglass!

  Jayke dug his eyeglass from a pocket and opened it, cursing when he realised it had misted up against his sweaty skin. He wiped the lenses carefully on his shirt, never taking his eyes from the blemish in the sky just above the horizon. The fear was coming quickly, as it always did whenever he thought about why he was really here, why his family had lived in this place for generations. He went cold, sweat cooling him further, his heart stuttered, his stomach lurched and he was almost sick.

  Dropping to his knees in the sand he brought up the eyeglass and stared to the north.

  And then he ran.

  No gulls, these. They were too far away to be certain, but they looked like hawks. Dozens of them flying in a loose formation, their massive webbed tentacles stroking the air almost gently, only needing a few swipes per minute to keep their bodies aloft.

  Jayke sprinted along the beach, his footprints illustrating his panic. The turtle eggs bounced from his pocket and one of them broke on the sand. It was a bad egg, putrid. If he had eaten it he would have died.

  He had read of hawks in one of the many books his family had accumulated. How they were spied only very rarely, how they normally remained way above the clouds, living there, eating, loving, mating, dying, disintegrating on the high breezes that kept them aloft even as they wasted away. He was heading for the path up to his house, and his weapons, and the doves that sat ready to be released with their warning. Because the only time hawks had ever been seen in group was when they were controlled, harnessed and ridden like horses of the skies. And that was most common during the Cataclysmic War. Back then, the riders had been Krotes, the Mages’ warriors.

  Jayke only turned to look again when he reached the foot of the steps leading up to the top of the cliff. He had dropped his eyeglass but he did not need it; the threat had closed in all too fast. In doing so the truth had seemingly manifested from his fears. These really were hawks, huge hawks, and although they were still miles out he could see the figures seated upright behind the creatures’ heads.

  He started climbing. His life was over. He had never thought it would come to this—after so long he had come to believe that the Mages were dead—but now that it was happening he had purpose, meaning, a mission to fulfil before he died. Death was not a frightening prospect for Jayke. He had been here alone for so long, and he saw enough life and death in nature to know that it was an important consequence of existence. Not even the manner of his death worried him unduly; however unpleasant, the death moon would take him to itself and give him to the Black. The only thing that terrified him was failure.

  He had spent his whole life here for one purpose: to give Noreela warning should the Mages return this way.

  He was halfway up the cliff when he first heard the screams. Perhaps they came from the hawks, he thought. Or maybe the Krotes sitting astride their necks were calling out in glee at the prospect of spilling blood. Either way Jayke ignored the noise. To turn around now he would have to stop, and that would admit defeat.

  If only I’d stayed at the house, not gone for breakfast.

  But he had to eat.

  If only I could have enjoyed sitting and watching as much as I enjoyed walking!

  But he had been here for forty years. He could not punish himself with thoughts of disgrace. Whatever happened now, he had already fulfilled his charge.

  Jayke kept climbing, wishing himself higher and closer to the house. There were weapons in there, but first he had to free the doves. There were a hundred birds in all, fit and healthy, trained from birth to fly east and south until their message was delivered into human hands. And that message, tied ready in leather pouches on their legs, was stark and simple: The Mages are coming.

  That scream again, assaulting his ears and echoing from the cliff face. He could not help glancing back, and he saw that the hawks had spread out just above the water. There were dozens of them—maybe a hundred in all—and Jayke could not help comparing that number with those messenger doves he was desperate to release.

  The Krotes started shouting as the hawks approached the beach. There was no meaning to their words, no language other than bloodlust.

  Jayke was almost at the top of the cliff. He was exhausted, but fear kept him moving. Thirty paces, that was all, thirty paces to the house, and then he could do his best to give warning to the land. He looked back again in time to see the hawks sweep up from the beach and rise above the cliff, a living wave breaking violently against Noreela’s shore.

  The flying things were even larger than Jayke had believed. Their hides were speckled black, partly transparent, hideous organs pulsing vaguely inside. They were fat and bloated with gases that aided buoyancy, and their beaks were as big as a man, serrated, yellowed and streaked with the remains of old victims. The downdraft from their movement sent Jayke sprawling to the ground, kicked up dust, blew grit in a whisper against the windows and walls of his house. They rose along the whole length of the cliff, rising on thermals as if blasted straight up from the beach, and most of them immediately headed south, across the island of Land’s End and towards Noreela.

  Between here and Noreela lay the Bay of Cantrassa, four hundred miles of open ocean. Jayke wondered how fast these things could fly. And whether the doves would fly faster.

  A dozen hawks dipped down and came at him, their riders screeching, raising bows and letting fly arrows. One struck Jayke in the shoulder and he spun and fell, cursing, not yet not yet not yet. He found his feet and staggered to the door, pressing through as more arrows struck the walls around him, the door, his leg. He stumbled inside and kicked the door shut with his good leg, unable to turn in the narrow corridor because of the long shafts protruding from his shoulder and knee.

  He was dizzied already by blood loss … and something else. His throat was swelling, airway blocking, and he knew that the arrows were tipped with poison.

  There was more screeching from outside. The sound of the hawks’ venting was like thunder against the house, and one of them landed on the roof, smashing broken tiles down onto Jayke’s head. The monstrous creature pecked at his home, and its disregard for his history made him mad.

  A hole appeared in his roof, a ragged rent battered and enlarged again and again by the creature’s vicious beak. As Jayke leaned against a wall and slid himself along, vision blurring, a Krote peered through the hole.

  “I haven’t killed for too many moons,” the Krote said, her voice surprisingly gentle and calm.

  “Fuck you,” Jayke muttered, and the Mage warrior laughed as Jayke fell into the back room. His leg was a block of wood, his shoulder stiff and burning with shed blood, and as the poison coursed through his veins it was only rage keeping him moving. Rage, and duty. He had to released the doves, to warn the neighbouring islands along The Spine if nothing else. He snatched a primed and loaded crossbow f
rom the wall, glancing at the shelves of books he would never read again, and staggered to another door, this one leading into the aviary where the doves were waiting.

  They were in tumult. A hawk had landed in the vegetable garden behind the house and it sat there snorting, blood and mucus dripping from its beak. The doves fluttered and fought to back away from the monstrous vision, pecking, crying, and when Jayke appeared in their midst they turned on him.

  “No!” he shouted. He hissed to the birds, sounds and words that could communicate concepts and direction, and as the Krote sitting on the hawk started to laugh, the doves immediately settled.

  Jayke fell on the handle that flipped open the enclosure. The screens fell away, the Krote raised his bow in a lazy, dismissive gesture, and Jayke brought up his crossbow and let fly. The bolt struck home in the Krote’s left eye. Mortally wounded, poisoned, half-blinded though he may be, Jayke had lived alone for forty years, hunting rabbit and pheasant with his crossbow. Target practise was something he’d had a lot for time for.

  The warrior let out a surprised gasp and tipped sideways in his saddle. The hawk seemed not to notice its rider’s sudden death, and it pecked listlessly at the ground as the Krote tumbled from its left flank and hit the dirt.

  “First blood,” Jayke whispered. He hoped that it was a good omen for Noreela.

  He hissed and whistled once again to the birds. They turned to look at him and it was almost as if they knew of his wounds, knew that this time they would not fly home. They cooed, their throats swelled and vibrated, their small leather message pouches so full of hope and desperation. And then, as one mass, they took flight.

  Jayke slid down the stone wall, crying out as the arrow in his shoulder was snapped off. It had been morning when he found the turtle’s eggs, he was sure, and yet dusk now seemed to be closing in. The sky was growing dark. His vision was fading. And with a hundred doves in the air, it looked as if it was snowing.