by Tim Lebbon
And then the blood.
The river turned red. The colour was a brash blow against the sepia view he had grown used to so quickly. He rose quickly from the bloody waters, trying to look away but fascinated by the wash of red travelling against the flow. He drew in his questing thoughts, afraid of being seen, trapped and pulled down … and then the red coalesced into individual parts, and each part was a boat. He drew closer, hiding behind a fold in the plane of reality, and tried to see clearer.
Each boat was small, topped with a grimy sail, moving across the water like a giant spider, paddles splashing down and hauling them against the flow. They moved fast and the rowers did not tire. They were dressed in red from head to foot.
Trey pulled up and away, fleeing from the river lest he be seen or sensed. These things were powerful, awful and terrifying, but he was sure they could not see as far as him. If they could he would feel them … their senses crawling across his mind, engulfing it in their rage.
Mage shit, Trey thought as he shifted quickly back to his own body. Mage shit, we don’t want to meet them.
“Boats, filled with Red Monks,” he said. Kosar and A’Meer frowned down at him. Rafe sat a small distance away, watching him as he spoke but saying and revealing nothing. His eyes—haunted and pained when they had first met—seemed to have settled into something stranger.
“How many boats?”
“Four or five,” Trey said. “Maybe twenty Monks in each. So inhuman. Men and women, but not all there. Like they’re stripped away to the bare bone, their souls … fractured. Flayed down to the basic. What are those things?”
“Things we don’t want to meet,” A’Meer said. “How far?”
Trey closed his eyes, trying to remember, not sure but unwilling to reveal his uncertainty. They need me, he thought, and I need them to need me. “Not that close,” he said. “Misted by the distance. It’s difficult to judge; I’m not used to casting so far and distances up here are so much more than I’m used to. Before a few days ago, I’d never been more than a couple of miles from home.”
“Never mind,” Kosar said. “At least—“
“Think,” A’Meer hissed. “Give us a best guess! We can’t leave it to chance. Kosar and I barely fought off just one of those red fucks. We meet up with a hundred of them, the first thing I do is fall on my own sword, I swear. We need to know, Trey. We need to know how much time we have.”
He blinked up at the short warrior woman. Her black hair was tied back from her pale face, her eyes were beautiful. She wore her weapon harnesses and sheaths like a second skin. He was not sure who scared him the most: the Red Monks, or A’Meer.
“Far enough,” he said, looking past A’Meer and down at the river in the distance. “We’ve got time. They’re moving quickly, but against the flow of the river. We have the horses.”
A’Meer spun away. “We leave now.”
“The rabbit you caught,” Hope said. “I was about to spice it.”
“Do it on the move,” A’Meer said.
“Bad,” Trey said, “I smell something bad about to happen.”
“The river’s not what we think,” a voice said, and they all turned to Rafe. He had barely spoken since the night before, seemingly content to let them guide the way, steer him forward and take control. “It’s much more temperamental than you imagine. It’s just as likely that it will bring the Monks to us as we’re crossing.”
“Your magic tells you this?” Kosar asked.
Rafe looked up at the big thief, and for a brief instant Trey saw something flash across the boy’s face that made him look very old. Then he looked out across the plains. “It’s not my magic, Kosar. And no, it doesn’t tell me, it shows me.” He closed his eyes, but they sprang open again. “Look. It shows us already.”
As Trey turned to see what Rafe had seen, he heard Hope gasp: “You’re doing that?”
“The land’s doing it to itself,” Rafe said. “It’s all mixed up, it’s balance is going awry, has been for decades. Air frozen to glass, Kosar? Sinkholes, Trey? The land is eating itself, and we arrived here at just the wrong time.” He shook his head and looked down into his open hands, as if expecting to find himself holding something. “Whatever’s in me, it might already be too late.”
Inside, Rafe was in turmoil. Like the river across the plains, he was battling against himself, feeling the old Rafe—confused, frightened, wanting nothing more than the peace to mourn his dead parents—trying to ignore the strangeness growing inside. He could see it, sense it, taste its power and its need for him to nurture and understand. But he did not want it. He willed it away with every breath he took, but like his heartbeat it was always there in the background, whispering to him however hard he tried not to hear.
Such spaces opening up. Such pressure, so precious. And yet this most powerful entity was still much like a baby, needing him, body and mind and soul, to protect it until revelation.
Now, it screamed.
“What in the name of all that’s fucking magic?” Hope whispered.
“Maybe,” Kosar said. “Maybe.” He reached out to touch A’Meer and found her hand outstretched, waiting for his.
Even from far away they could heard the noise. It came in at them across the plains, rolling like thunder, vibrating through the ground, grasses shimmering in waves as if struck by a sudden wind. Downriver from San, three miles distant from them, the river was in revolt. It looked like a liquid eruption, an explosion of water and spray that rose hundred of steps into the air, fanned out into a mushroom shape and fell, constantly fed from the tumultuous river. Spray was caught in the high breeze: white where the water was fresh, a dirty red where it had plucked clay from the riverbed, spiky green where trees and shrubs had been ripped out and thrown downstream by the upheaval. The river burst its banks and coursed out onto the flood plain, shoving vegetation before it, mud, other things too small to make out.
“What’s happening?” Kosar said. Nobody answered because none of them knew.
The river flowing downstream past San continued to meet the watery explosion, feeding it like air feeds fire. Rainbows danced within the eruption’s destructive depths, shimmering left and right as the contours of the water mountain changed and shifted. Two rainbows, three, flirting with the water like butterflies. But there was no ceremony here, no one to impress; this was basic, elemental force unleashed, a thrashing power that was whipping out its frenzy on the river surrounding the lowlands.
Downriver, away from the chaos, Kosar noticed that water still seemed to flow along the riverbed. He thought the flow would have lessened, such was the amount being pumped into the air and across the plains, but it seemed full and flush, turbulence transmitted from upstream causing white breakers to batter the shores as far as he could see. Trees downstream started to tilt into the river, their roots exposed and pulled into the mire. But they did not float away. Instead, they bobbed into each other, rising and falling on the disturbed waters but not seeming to move apart from that. Motionless, as if the river was now a lake with no current or flow.
Birds were startled into the air—a flock of geese gobbled their way overhead—and he could see the darting shapes of animals fleeing towards them to seek the high hills. Some were small and he had no concerns about them, but there were a few larger shapes bounding from hedge to bush to copse, instinct still telling them to utilise cover even though their lives may be about to end. What are they? Kosar wondered. They looked big. Most were probably cattle kept by the villagers of San, but maybe there were wolves in there, and perhaps a foxlion or two. His hand stole to his sword, but the sheer power of what they were witnessing soon wiped any threat from his mind.
This is the power of nature gone bad, he thought. And then he realised the truth and he knew that he was wrong. This was all-powerful yes, but it was not nature, not as it should have been. Rivers in nature ran one way only.
“It’s turning,” he said to no one, but they all heard. “It’s flowing the opposite way. It�
�s like the land has tilted and the river’s changing direction.”
“It hurts,” Rafe muttered, and then he screamed: “It hurts!”
Kosar turned and saw that the boy had gone to his knees. Hope was there to hold him, talk to him, but there was no comfort to be had.
“It’s flooding the plains,” A’Meer said.
The tumult in the river had lessened somewhat, but now a wave formed and began its journey back upstream. It growled by the banks, scouring them clear of vegetation, picking up boulders and rolling them along, and the roar was like the land screaming as it was cleaved in two. The wave was way beyond the normal confines of the river now, stretching out across the plains a mile wide and still growing. It rumbled, and the land before it cried as if knowing what was to come.
“San,” he said, and he remembered the faces of some of the people he had met. They would be different now, mouths opened in terror and eyes wide, too shocked for tears.
“It won’t take long,” A’Meer said, as if that could make everything better.
There was a relentless inevitability about the wave. It rolled upstream and over the little village of San. From this far away Kosar could make out little detail of San’s destruction, and for that he was glad. A few buildings broke upwards, timbers thrusting at the sky, forced up by the deluge. Some of the fishing boats rode the wave for a few seconds before tumbling and being smashed into flotsam, still topping the wave but now in pieces. A couple of the jetties—their posts cast down into the riverbed years before the land had even heard of the Mages—rolled over and over, ripped out and sent tumbling upstream away from the village.
Of the people from the village of San, he saw nothing.
As if San had been the true target of its upheaval, the wave seemed to spread out and diminish after it passed by. It left little behind. Vague outlines of some of the larger buildings remained, shorn of their roofs and walls collapsed outward. The landscape, the village, the route of the river itself had taken on a uniform grey-brown colour, silt coughed up from the bed now smothering everything. The water defied its previous confinement, settling into new shapes: lakes and ponds which bubbled and foamed from their unnatural and forceful births.
It took a few minutes for the waters to calm down.
Kosar and the others were silent but for Rafe’s quiet crying. He shed no actual tears, Kosar saw, as if not wishing to add to the flood. There was little to say so they simply watched. A large rainbow hung over the scene of devastation, its colours too pure to be welcome. The air was filled with swathes of mist, and the watchers soon found its cool touch coalescing on their skin, bringing with it the smell and taste of the disaster.
Eventually the noise subsided, the mists parted, and the river ran upstream.
Rafe cried on the outside, and inside the magic still discovering itself howled. Like a sentient thing it mourned the death of its old existence, and though now resurrected it still felt the pain and betrayal at being misused by the Mages so many year ago. It mourned also the ongoing destruction their misuse had eventually caused. Rafe could not shut out the thoughts because he was not party to them; he was an observer—sympathetic, concerned and unequivocally entwined—but still separate from the power raging within. His fingertips prickled with its potential, his toes and other extremities warm and tingling with the force coursing through him. And in its blind rage and raging sorrow, he was not sure what he could see. Anger and hatred, hope and yearning, sorrow and vengefulness, he was not certain where the crying took root, nor what drove that fearsome energy he knew was building somewhere deep inside of him.
Rafe cried from the pain, the sorrow and the fear. But his tears were also for himself because he felt so hopeless.
He had no idea what would happen next.
“Well, now it’s more than a river to cross,” A’Meer said quietly.
“We can ride up into the foothills,” Kosar said. He turned to look at Rafe, thinking that perhaps the boy could help them. But Rafe barely looked as though he could help himself. “Cross the river at its source.”
“Yes,” A’Meer said. She was still staring down into the shallow valley, stunned.
“Not its source any longer,” Trey said. “What do you think we’ll find if we go up into the Widow’s Peaks?” He stared at them, his thin face sad.
Kosar barked a bitter laugh. “We’re stupid,” he said to A’Meer. He pointed at the river, uprooted trees floating slowly from right to left. “Upriver. We’ll find only floods when we get there. How can a river flow the wrong way? For how long?”
“The water will gather in the hills and mountains, and within days or hours it’ll come back this way again,” Trey said. “Maybe within minutes.”
“More than just a river then,” Hope said. “It’ll be a lake rushing down this way. A sea.”
“It’ll make this look like a splash in a pond.” Trey waved his hand to encompass the scene before them, and Kosar knew that he was right. Whatever unnatural cause, however wrong this was, the river could only flow uphill for so long before the its tremendous energy would be unleashed once again. And then it would return the way it had come, faster, a million times more deadly.
“But why …?” Trey said, glancing down at Rafe as if expecting an answer.
“This is happening all over,” Hope said. “It’s the land wearing down and turning bad. Swallow holes, frozen air, flaming skies … and rivers running upstream. We’re just here at the wrong time. Bad luck. There’s plenty of bad luck in Noreela.”
“But the magic is back, in him. Isn’t it? Isn’t that why we’re all risking so much to protect him?”
“You’re giving magic a character,” Hope said. “It’s so much more alive than us, so much more meant to be, but that doesn’t mean it has thought. And why should it? Thinking like us, with our greed and avarice and disregard ... that’s what made the Mages what they are. That’s why they did what they did, and magic tore itself from us after the Cataclysmic War. The effects of that are still being felt—we’ve just seen that—and we can only hope that if it does chose to return through Rafe, then it will make everything better again.”
“Or much, much worse,” Kosar said. The force he had just witnessed was nothing compared to what true magic could accomplish. The stories he had heard, the legends of machines spanning valleys, flying through the air, churning the ground …
“The Red Monks!” A’Meer said, suddenly. “They may still be on the river, and now its flow is with them. We have to move! Now!”
Confused, shocked, they gathered their gear together, mounted the horses and started off down the hillside. Hope walked beside Rafe once more, and Trey guided the unconscious Alishia on her mount. As they reached the flatlands and the fringes of destruction, Hope ran from horse to horse, giving the riders a torn shred of the rabbit A’Meer had killed before the river’s upheaval. She had used some powder or potion to heat away its rawness, and although still cold it tasted cooked and spiced.
Kosar chewed on the leg Hope had given him, not really enjoying the taste. There was too much on his mind, and since the idea had suggested itself to him a few minutes before … perhaps the Monks are right … he had been more confused than ever. Here they were racing across Noreela to deliver Rafe to New Shanti, this boy who seemed to have magic awakening within him, using him as a conduit into this world, testing the waters before revealing itself fully. And at the same time it was highly probable that were they still alive, the Mages would have heard about Rafe and perhaps seen what happened when he cured A’Meer. Alishia was evidence of that, the girl whose mind had been torn apart by some psychic invader before the thing fled back whence it had come. The Mages would covet him and this new magic. And if they caught him, snatched him from their grasp or waged war on Noreela to steal him away, magic may well be back in their hands.
And then?
Burning air or rivers running upstream would be the least terrible things. Last time, the Mages had practised out of greed and lust f
or power. This time, were they to harness the magic, theirs would be a triumphant return from exile. If their armies were dead and gone to dust, they would make new ones. If their soldiers could not run fast enough, they would build machines. This time, revenge would be their prime motive.
… perhaps the Monks are right …
At the diving line between normality—long grasses wavering in the slight breeze, the ground dry and hard beneath them—and the watery transgression of the river’s unnatural flood, the horses and travellers paused. Kosar and A’Meer’s mounts stamped the ground and snorted, while the weaker horses carrying Rafe and Alishia merely stood with their heads bowed, foaming pinkly at the mouth.
Alishia mumbled something and twitched in the saddle.
Rafe frowned at the ground.
A’Meer headed off first. Her horse splashed its hooves through the first puddle of water, and side-stepped the corpse of a sheebok that had been burst open by some huge impact. Split timber planks were embedded in the mud. In raised areas the grass had been washed flat, most of its subsoil having been washed away, its blades doomed to dry and die in the sun. Other bodies lay scattered around: several chickens feathers ruffled and coated with mud; a furbat, leathery wings spread as if trying to fly; a girl, braided hair twisted like ropes about her neck. Her eyes stared skyward, filled with its blue reflection, and there were no marks upon her body, no bloody patches on her white dress.
They tried to keep to the high ground. Kosar’s horse stumbled once into a deeper puddle, the dip in the ground hidden by the murky water, and he had to twist and hold on tight to prevent being thrown. His mount panicked and struggled to regain its footing, kicking, legs churning the water, and a dead thing bobbed to the surface. It was a fish as big as a man, yellow and bloated. Even the river life had not escaped a violent death.
The sun bore down on the watery destruction and soon a fine mist rose, drifting slowly on the breeze and dancing where air currents were confused. They began to sweat in the balmy atmosphere, but Rafe seemed not to notice. He was looking down at his horse’s hooves, watching the dead things they stepped over or around, hiding whatever he felt inside.
