Dusk: a dark fantasy novel (A Noreela novel)

by Tim Lebbon

  They came across a knot of bodies, seven or eight of them tangled together where they had been deposited against a huge rock. Unlike the drowned little girl, these all showed signs of the trauma they had been through. There were men and women, and a couple of corpses that were damaged beyond identification. No carrion picked at their tattered remains; no flies buzzed their opened, washed-out grey wounds. Perhaps it was because they had only just died and the things that fed on dead things had yet to discover them. Or perhaps those things did not wish to feast upon corpses created by nature’s upheaval. There would always be plenty of dead things elsewhere.

  The mist did not hide the horrific sights, but it made them hazy. In a way that was worse. Truths half-hidden were dwelled upon endlessly, their realities filled in with imaginations overwrought by what was around them.

  Rafe barely raised his head. If he had magic to cure the ills of the land, he did not show it now.

  As they neared the river, higher areas of ground became less and less frequent. The flood-waters were deeper and more expansive, and eventually the landscape changed so that there was more water than land. The horses found it easy wading through the water at first, but Hope and Trey were soon struggling, and eventually they stopped and were hauled up, Hope behind Kosar, Trey behind A’Meer. The four horses continued on their way, the water sometimes touching their bellies.

  As they drew closer to what was still, they supposed, the River San, they could make out more of what was left of the village. Its riverside areas had been totally torn away; piers, jetties and fishing sheds all gone, smashed up and spread across the plains along with those unfortunate enough to have been on or in them at the time. Further inland, there was still little recognisible as part of a village. A stone wall here, a boat there, smashed in half, come to rest against a mound of stones that may have been the remains of a home. There was little evidence floating on the water—the ruins of the village had been washed along the river and distributed inland, floating and bobbing now around their horse’s feet, wood and cloth and dead fish and dead people all that was left of San.

  “We’ll be at the old river bank soon,” Kosar said. He glanced down at where the water washed against the horse’s thighs. “It’ll be much deeper there. We’ll need a boat, a ferry, something to get us across.”

  “There’s nothing left,” Hope said behind him.

  “There has to be,” A’Meer said. Whether she spoke with certainty or desperation was not clear.

  “How far away can those Monks be?” Kosar asked. “Trey, they were in boats. Did they have horses?”

  Trey, sitting behind A’Meer, frowned and shook his head. “No horses, I don’t think,” he said. “Just lots of Monks. Small boats, but fast. They were rowing, and sailing as well.”

  “So if they do reach us before we’re across, we’ll still have a chance,” Kosar said. “We can run faster than them.”

  “Two of us on each of the good horses?” Hope asked. “And those back there … I traded them from farmers who could barely feed themselves, let alone their livestock. I’m surprised they’re not dead already. Two minutes galloping and they’ll collapse. We should swap … Rafe should have one of these, he’s the important one.”

  “We’re all important,” A’Meer said.

  “But he’s the one we’re trying to save,” Hope said quietly, tattoos in turmoil.

  “Whatever, we can’t get much further than this,” A’Meer said. They came to a halt on a mound with its tree-lined head protruding slightly above the water. There was room to dismount and walk to the river’s edge, look out across the wide expanse of muddied water at the opposite side, ambiguous in the mist, the true edge of the river indistinguishable from the flooded plain. The waters flowed from right to left, the results of its violent upheaval floating along with it. Trees and bushes, bodies and smashed timber boarding, and a few things still struggling to remain afloat, wings waving, legs kicking. It seemed the animals were stronger in a disaster such as this, because the only people they saw were dead.

  “Shit, it’s hot,” Trey said. He had stripped to his trousers and boots, and Kosar saw the varied scars on his yellow skin, wounds from innumerable accidents below ground. He wondered what Hope looks like beneath her rough dress, whether the tattoos continued out of sight, forming their own secret designs. There was much secrecy about her, however open she claimed to be, and he feared that her shoulder bag held much they had not yet seen.

  “Rafe?” Hope said. “Is there anything you can do for us?”

  Rafe blinked as if she had spoken an unknown tongue.

  “Rafe?”

  “I’m only a farm boy,” he said. He frowned as he spoke and leaned sideways in the saddle, splaying his fingers and touching this island of grass and trees. “This is good soil.”

  Hope shook her head, glanced at Kosar, looked across the river once more.

  “I could swim it,” A’Meer said. “Get over to what’s left of San and see if there’s a boat there, something left undamaged.”

  “And then?” Kosar said. “Will you paddle it against the flow for us? Dodge the trees that will hole the boat if they hit you?”

  “What else do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “We have to risk it with the horses, I suppose. It may be shallow enough for most of the way for them to walk, and then they can swim when they have to. Horses are good swimmers. And—“

  “We’ll drown,” Trey said. “And I can’t swim. Not much need of it in the mines.”

  “He’s right,” A’Meer said. She kicked a stick, watched it tumble into the waters and drift up towards the Widow’s Peaks. “We’ll drown.” She turned and looked at Rafe, silently asking him the question Hope had just posed.

  He had dismounted and was down on his knees, not only running his fingers through the grasses now but digging them in, thrusting his fingers into the wet soil up to the knuckles, kneading it, pushing himself as close to the ground as he could. And he was whining, like a dog about to be whipped or missing its master, punishment or loss, both the sounds of heartache.

  “Rafe?” A’Meer asked. He looked up at them. But his eyes were glazed, and in them they saw something much, much more than human.

  He saw magic across the land. The old magic, accepted and revered and honoured many generations before the Mages had betrayed it. He saw the good it had done, the ease with which is was incorporated into lives, the benevolent power it exhaled. It demanded no sacrifice, homage or worship, but it honoured the respect it engendered, and grew along with the world it served. Its energy was limitless, its boundaries without end. The people of the land translated its efficacy as far as their imagination allowed, and although there was much more—so much more—the magic did not provoke beliefs or understanding that the people were not able to comprehend. They used it to run the machines that turned soil in their fields, when it could have grown the crops themselves. They used it to provide succour to those dying from awful illnesses, when in fact it could have cured those illnesses with a touch. It fed fires when it could have made them, gathered building materials when it could have constructed the buildings themselves, carried messages across the land when it could have passed them at the speed of thought. The people used magic to serve them and entertain them and aid them in the way of life they choose, and even though it could have done so much more it was content with that. It was not a jealous god.

  Rafe saw this and recognised the potential he carried, that growing knot of power that seemed so far down that it was deeper than his soul, more a part of him than his own personality, memories and thoughts, and yet totally alien. He fed it his wonder and it fed back a sense of calmness, confidence and security. He thought of where he had come from—rescued from out on the hillside, his parents had told him—and wondered who had left him, what they had known of his origins. He supposed he been destined for this, and though his bloodline was a mystery he did not concern himself with it. It was the here and
now that mattered. That, and the love he would always feel for his parents, even though this fledgling magic had indirectly caused their deaths.

  And yet beneath all of this, the magic was a child. That such power could labour under such vulnerability was a shock to Rafe. He had not taken time before to consider why it was inside him and nowhere else; he had not wondered at its secrecy; he had assumed that it was a seed, planted and waiting to germinate when the time was right. He had never guessed that it may be hiding.

  He, a farm boy of mysterious beginnings, protected by a band of people who all had different reasons and motives, was this new magic’s sole protector.

  That made him sad. It exposed the true disorder of things, the random and unfeeling dangers of existence, and it was that more than anything that gave Rafe his first truly autonomous touch of magic. And when he fisted his hands around rich soil, he felt a surge of energy pulsing both ways: from him into the ground; and up out of the land, feeding him, trading itself for the small thing he had to do.

  Healing A’Meer had been an example for his own benefit. Now, convinced at last, he began to take some control.

  “There’s something happening out there,” Trey said. “I can’t see … the mist …”

  “Something in the water,” Hope said.

  Kosar watched Rafe squeeze both hands tightly around clots of mud and drive his fists into the ground. A’Meer glanced across and he nodded down at the boy, not saying a word. The Shantasi’s eyes were wide and amazed.

  The Monks are not right, Kosar thought. No one has a right to destroy this.

  Out in the river the waters were boiling, sending spouts of spray and steam into the air. The river continued to flow but the disturbance remained in the same place, directly across from the small hillock where they stood watching. A huge tree, snapped by the force of its upheaval, flowed along the river and was nudged aside by the foaming water. The violence in the river began to lessen and something appeared at its centre, a solid shape breaking surface and turning over, like some leviathan touching sunlight for the first time, exposing a moss-encrusted underside as it balanced on end, turned and dropped down into the river with a huge splash.

  A boat. It turned in the water, spinning in the current, and then began slipping sideways against the flow. The sound of water breaking against its hull was like a giant voiding a century’s worth of flooded lungs.

  Kosar looked at the boat, Rafe, A’Meer, back to the boat.

  “Witchcraft,” Hope muttered. And then she smiled, the tattoos on her face actually forming something beautiful.

  As the boat nudged the hillock Trey and Kosar ran down and grabbed its slimy hull.

  “It’s been down for a long time,” Rafe said. He had dropped the handfuls of dirt and stood now next to the horses, his eyes serene and confident. “There are plenty of others down there—some just added—but this one was the most complete. No mast, no sails of course, no paddles. But it was swamped, not broken. The hull should be sound enough to get us across, at least.” He looked suddenly tired, swaying slightly and holding a horse’s reins to keep his balance. He glanced back at the ground, seeing something invisible there.

  “How did you …?” A’Meer said.

  “That’s all I can do for now.” Rafe let go of the horse and knelt, lay down on his side, closed his eyes.

  The four of them stood for a few silent seconds—Kosar and Trey holding the ragged old boat against the river’s pull, Hope and A’Meer unmoving, amazed—and then Kosar shook the surprise from his mind.

  “Hurry!” he said. “We can’t hold this thing for long, and with him asleep …”

  “Will it take the horses?” Hope asked.

  Kosar shrugged. “We can try. The fit ones first, then we’ll see if there’s room for the other two.”

  They guided the first two horses over the lip and into the centre of the boat, lifted Alishia and Rafe and placed them gently at the stern, then tried to urge the two weaker horses on board. They refused, and no amount of cajoling would convince them otherwise.

  “Maybe they’re so tired they’d rather just stay here and die,” Trey said.

  “Maybe they know what they’ll face if they come with us,” Hope replied. There was nothing else they could do, so they stripped the two horses of their gear, stowed it on deck and shoved off into the river. The horses watched them go.

  The current grabbed them instantly, and swept the boat out into the centre of the river. Its bow twisted around, streamlining it against the current, and they were soon moving past the remains of San.

  They were moving too fast to stand and stare.

  “We need to get over to the other side,” Kosar said, standing on the bow, legs propped wide. He looked across at where the flood had burst through the banks. Less that a hundred steps would take them to safe ground.

  “The river’s got us,” Trey said. “It’s hungry. It’ll carry us uphill until the back-surge sets in. The wave coming down will be ten times the one we just saw, twenty, a hundred.”

  “We won’t be here when that happens,” Kosar said.

  “Oh? And how do you—“

  “Stop whining and start thinking, that’s how,” Hope said. A’Meer raised her eyebrows at Kosar and glanced skyward—he was glad to see the humour there, it comforted him and saved him after the dreadful sights of the past hour—and then she started stamping at the deck.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Trey shouted. The noise unsettled the two horses and they stamped their hooves in sympathy.

  A plank of wood suddenly sprang free of rusted nails, and A’Meer caught it before it fell back. Hefty it in both hands, she walked to port and started rowing. “Paddle,” she said.

  Kosar, Trey and Hope prised planks from around the gap A’Meer had already created. Within two minutes they had lined up along the port side of the boat and started paddling, turning its nose slowly for shore. The current drove them on but was not strong enough to fight their combined effort, and gradually they came closer to where the old riverbank lay.

  They found it with a crunch that almost tore the bottom from the boat. Kosar and Hope went sprawling, while Trey and A’Meer had to clutch at each other to keep their balance. The horses skidded across the wet timbers, snorting in fear, but A’Meer grabbed both sets of reins and talked in a low, calming voice, soothing them. As soon as the boat had grounded firmly A’Meer was over the side, up to her thighs in water and leading the horses out and away from the river. They tried to rear up in panic, but her soothing continued, and she kept eye contact with them as much as she could. They seemed calmed by that. Kosar smiled; he knew how they felt.

  The water was trying to tug the boat back into the river—it seemed to be flowing even faster now, as if the waters were keen to force themselves up into the mountains—and Kosar did his best to keep it grounded while Trey and Hope heaved first Rafe, and then Alishia out. They held them out of the water and struggled across to where A’Meer waited, and she helped them lift the two unconscious forms up onto the horses. Rafe stirred as they moved him, trying to aid them with weak attempts to pull himself up into the saddle. Alishia was like a corpse, only lighter.

  Kosar let go of the boat and stepped back, allowing the river to grab the stern and twist it around the pivot of the grounded bow. Lighter now by six people and two horses, it was snatched from the shore and taken out into the stream. He went to A’Meer and took the reins of a horse from her, patting its nose when it seemed to object to its change of master.

  “Let’s go,” A’Meer said. She was aiming for a spread of higher ground a few hundred steps inland, a place where trees still stood free of the flood and a few small animals milled, frightened and confused. Nobody disagreed with the Shantasi. As if successfully crossing the river had instilled a new sense of urgency, there was no petty arguing about which way to go or how to get there. They all knew that the Red Monks were on the river and heading their way, and now that they were on the other side the need to put dist
ance between themselves and San was great. The Monks would expect them to be coming from the north. Now that they had crossed and could head south, it was just possible that they might fool them and have a clear run to New Shanti.

  But Kosar knew just how vain this thought was. He had seen a Red Monk in action, and he knew how persistent they were, how committed. He and the others may well have crossed the flooded river, but there were still three hundred miles of wild terrain between them and Hess, including the Mol’Steria Desert. If the Monks had sent so many of their number upriver, there must be other complements travelling in from a different direction, spreading across the land, searching.

  The two horses seemed strong, and they carried the prone forms of Rafe and Alishia with ease. A’Meer was tireless, even after the terrible wounds and infections of the past couple of days; perhaps Rafe’s magical touch had done more than cure her. Trey seemed distant, never keen to meet Kosar’s eye. Hope stayed as close to Rafe’s horse as possible, reaching out now and again to touch him, looking around at the others with suspicious eyes. Kosar worried about her. It seemed that she was constantly there, awaiting any dregs of magic that Rafe might throw off, ready to take them into herself. In her eyes, below the suspicion, there lay a deep-rooted madness.

  Kosar no longer wondered just how he had come to be mixed up in this. He pushed through the water with the others, sometimes slipping and going beneath the muddy surface, shivering at its coolness, trying not to see the dead things bobbing all around. More and more his eyes strayed to Rafe. More and more he believed that the future of Noreela lay on the back of this stolen horse.

  Hope walked alongside Rafe, reaching out every now and then to touch him and make sure he was still real. He had long been in her dreams; she was afraid that he would vanish.