by Tim Lebbon
She had never been this far out, and it felt wonderful. Ahead of her, twenty miles distant, were the lower slopes of the Widow’s Peaks, their heads obscured by distance and wispy clouds, the veiled faces of true mourners. There were at least three distinct fledge mines in there, as well as scattered villages nestled between mountains like children in loving mothers’ arms. The sky above the mountains seemed larger and wilder than here above the city, its clouds richer, the colors deeper and more luxuriant. There were huge hawks above those mountains, so high up that they could never be seen, living out their lives on the wing and floating on air currents even when they were dead, drying out, going to dust and painting summer sunsets red. She had read about the hawks, though few people in the city believed in them anymore. She had read about so much: the Breakers who roamed the land dismantling ancient machines, still hoping to find dregs of old magic hidden in sumps or forgotten veins; the Violet Dogs, a race of walking dead that had supposedly invaded Noreela before any true records began, leaving their mark in forgotten caves and lost temples to the night; the Sleeping Gods, powerful beings that had taken to hibernation millennia ago and whom magic, should it ever return, was supposedly destined to wake. She had read about all of these wonders and myths and terrors, and now she had a chance to find out some of them for herself.
She had no idea where she was going, or what she would do when she arrived. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, Alishia felt alive.
THAT FIRST NIGHT she camped out on the plains.
The Widow’s Peaks were farther away than she had thought, and the route from the gates of Noreela City more circuitous and problematic than she had imagined. She had passed through several small hamlets populated by a mixture of farm folk and those that had obviously fled the city for shady reasons. The first settlement she passed through was quiet, a few faces peering from behind half-closed doors. At the second she was stopped and forced down from her horse, questioned by a pair of bogus militia, hassled until she gave them a tellan each to let her go. She had feared that this would become a road tax, a way of stealing without any true threat, and that she, a woman traveler on her own, would fall victim every time. But at the next collection of dilapidated homes peopled by a few disheveled occupants, she surprised herself.
The first man pulled her down from the horse. The second started to rifle through the bags hanging from her mount’s saddle hooks, but by that time Alishia already had her knife drawn and pressed into the helper’s throat.
What in Kang Kang am I doing?
“Hey now, lady, no harm done!” the second man said, backing away from the horse, hands outstretched. Alishia was disgusted but thrilled at the power she felt. He was genuinely scared. The other man slipped away from her and ran around the back of an old log-and-mud dwelling, closely followed by his mate. Alishia leapt onto her horse and galloped inexpertly away, afraid that she would tumble from the saddle, equally terrified that a crossbow bolt would find the back of her neck at any second.
A few minutes later she slowed the horse to a trot, invigorated with success. Later still, she decided that the men had not really been afraid of her. They were afraid of the type of people who usually traveled these roads, those that were used to actually using knives once they were drawn.
Alishia was far more cautious after that, leaving the rough road to skirt around the hamlets, even though it slowed her progress. She comforted herself with the thought that a journey with no end cannot be delayed. This was all a part of what she had set out to do. She had read about the dangers of travel in this degenerating world, and now she was living with them.
She set up camp way off the road, sheltered from the cool northerly breeze by a shelf of rock that marked where a river had flowed before real time began. There were several small firepots in her saddlebags and she set these around the camp, lighting them to ward off any predators that might be roaming the dusky landscape. There were bandits in the mountains, and sometimes they came down this far to slip into Noreela City via sewers and tunnels. If they passed her way, there was nothing to stop them from having their fun with her as a prelude to their incursion. And there were skull ravens that buzzed the plains at night, looking for weak cattle or lonely travelers. She could fight them off well enough if she was awake when they arrived, but not if she slept. Not if they could nudge her sleep into unconsciousness before pecking their way through her temple and into her skull.
And tumblers. Even they came down onto the plains on occasion. The fact that there had been no sightings for a long time was of little comfort.
So Alishia sat behind the rocks and cooked a jug of sheebok and herb stew she had brought with her. Her dinner spat and sizzled, covering any noises from farther away. Her horse stood quietly nearby, tied loosely to a lightning tree growing from the sparse earth between the rocks. She thought of her little room above the stables; of Erv panting in dark shadows as he watched her shadow dance on the ceiling as she undressed; of the old man in red who had burned down the library and changed her life, intentionally or not. And although she was afraid, she was also glad. The knife strapped against her thigh had helped her once already today. There were dangers out here, yes, but probably no more than she would find spending her life day to day in Noreela City, risking the wrath of the increasingly lawless population and belligerent militia. Even though she had never been out here, she knew of the dangers. She had read about them.
Eventually, Alishia slept.
SHE FOUND THE stranger just before noon of the next day. She had left the plains behind, heading up into the foothills of the Widow’s Peaks and wondering just where to go next. Fifty miles west was Pavisse, the old mining town that was known to be a haunt for criminals and undesirables. East lay the steam plains of Ventgoria. These were usually passable with care if the traveler kept to the marked routes, but Alishia had heard of markers being moved—although it was never clear who was to gain from leading travelers into steam pits—and the steam vents themselves were becoming more and more unpredictable. She had read a book not a dozen moons ago, a travelogue published on cheap paper with a print run of less than a hundred, which told of ventings the size of the largest buildings in Noreela City, great explosions of toxic steam from deep within the land as if it were sighing at the way things were going.
So Alishia had chosen the Widow’s Peaks themselves, and upon making that decision she had almost been overcome with a sudden, delicious realization: she was an explorer! She had always wanted to see a fledge mine. Perhaps if she was daring enough, she would even try some of the freshly harvested drug.
Still, finding a fledge miner dying out in the open air was not the introduction to mining she had expected.
She saw him from a distance, a pale yellow form slumped on a hillside. She paused, looking around for danger, aware that trickery like this was a bandit’s favored lure. The landscape was quiet but for the lonesome cry of a bird of prey, circling high overhead as it called to some distant mate. Birds hopped from rock to rock on her left, seemingly undisturbed. A group of sheebok grazed farther up the hillside, too far away to see her but near enough to the body to be startled away should it stir. She kept her eyes on the sheebok and birds, and edged the horse slowly forward.
Twenty steps from the fledger, she knew that this was no trick. His pale yellow skin was stretched from the sun, displaying how strange daylight was to him. Even unconscious he had one arm resting across his face, shielding his eyes. Yellow eyes, thought Alishia, yellowed from the drug. I can’t wait to see them.
She dismounted and knelt beside the miner. He was tall and thin, like all fledgers, and he still wore the sheebok leathers that kept him warm beneath ground. Alishia slowly peeled the clothes away from his body. He was soaked with sweat and he stank, but she finished removing the coat so that his underclothes could dry in the sun. A strange circular weapon lay unsheathed nearby, the blade smeared with dried blood. Alishia froze, looking around, trying to make out whether there had been
a struggle here, but there were no signs. So she closed her eyes and tried to picture where she was, recalling the maps of the region she had pored over many times before. The nearest fledge mine was only a couple of miles from here, deeper into the mountains. The fledger stank of the drug, his sweat a curious mixture of sour odor and sweet fledge. She dabbed her fingers to her tongue, tasting the salt of his sweat and the undertones of something more taboo.
He was battered and bruised, his neck bleeding from several deep scratches, his nose caked with dried blood, his hands, fingers and fingernails black with gore, apparently not his own. She glanced again at the strange sword. Whoever or whatever he had stood against had come off worse.
“Hey,” she said, not expecting an answer. The fledger did not stir.
Alishia returned to her horse and pulled a water gourd from the saddlebag. She would need to find a stream to replenish it soon, but for now there was enough to give the fledger a drink and take some herself. He seemed in a bad way. She was no nurse, but at least she could bathe and clean his wounds. As she knelt down next to the wounded man, he grabbed her wrists.
“They’re out!” he hissed. “They’re awake!”
Alishia started, but his grip prevented her from backing away. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, teeth bared, pain clear on his face and evident in his voice. He let go of her at last and started moaning.
“It’s all right,” she said, leaning forward again, tipping a splash of water into her palm. She had read many books about the fledge mines and those that mined them, and she had great respect for the way they had continued following the Cataclysmic War, machineless. In the dark, miles down, they used touch as well as sound to communicate.
She dripped water into his mouth, shaded his eyes, touched his forehead and cheek and the underside of his nose as she tried to calm him down. With each utterance she would gently stroke the skin of his face. She knew the method, not the language, and for all she knew she could be abusing the memory of his ancestors while trying to soothe him. But eventually it seemed to work, and the suffering man did not object when she draped one of her spare dresses across his face to shield it from the sun.
“The sun’s very high, it’s midday,” she said. “I know your eyes will be sensitive. Keep that there. I need to clean your wounds. I’ll keep talking as I move around so you know where I am. You’re safe, though, fledger. Whatever you were fleeing, it’s gone now.”
“They’ll never be gone,” he said, but Alishia did not reply. Serious discussion would be for later. Right now she simply needed to keep him awake.
While she worked, pulling back his shirt and bathing the cuts and scrapes across his skin, trying to ease the sunburn where his flesh lay exposed and reddened, she talked about things she knew. She started with fledge mining and how it had changed through history. Sometimes he snorted, other times he seemed entranced. She moved onto other things, random facts hauled from her memory, until the legend of the Violet Dogs seemed to grab his interest. There were songs, she said, although she could not sing. Ro Sargossa had written poems about the myth, but she could never do them justice.
“Where were they from?” the fledger asked.
“Beyond Noreela.”
“What’s beyond Noreela?”
“Sea. More sea. Whirlpools. Ice. Islands, some say, even big islands, with wild people and savage animals living on them. We’re the center of things, and beyond Noreela is the rough edge. That’s where the two Mages and their army fled to after the Cataclysmic War.”
“Something’s happening up here,” the miner said, wincing as Alishia caught a flap of loose skin over one deep cut.
“What do you mean?”
“Something bad, something threatening. The Nax know it. They’re awake! They killed Sonda, they took the whole cavern. They’re awake and angry!”
“You’re safe now,” she said, distracted. She glanced at his bloodied sword again. “Is that what you killed with your weapon?”
The fledger laughed and it was a sickly sound, like someone gargling with vomit. “The Nax! With a disc-sword? You have no idea, topsider.”
They remained silent for a while, Alishia tending his wounds and the miner letting out the occasional grunt or grateful sigh.
“I’m Trey,” he said at last. “Trey Barossa. This is my first time topside. My mother died in there. So did everyone else.”
“I’m Alishia. I’m sorry about your mother.”
“I have to tell someone, have to reach someone who can help.”
“Like who? The Duke? No one’s seen him for years.”
Trey frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “Are there militia? Authorities who should know, those who protect Noreela?” He opened his eyes slightly, and Alishia saw the tears. They were not only from the pain of sunlight hitting his yellowed eyes for the first time.
“You have very beautiful eyes,” she said, unable to help herself.
“I’m sorry,” Trey said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize you were a little girl.”
“I’m not! I just—”
“Sorry,” the miner said again, sitting up, holding his head in his hands and letting tears darken the ground between his knees. “But is there no one we can go to? There are hundreds of dead people down there, and the Nax will spread beneath the mountains. We have to tell the other mines. There are thousands of people living beneath these mountains alone. You know there’s a whole world down there, Alishia. The Nax can destroy it. We’ve known that forever, but forever they’ve kept quiet. Now they’ve been woken.”
“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, traveling 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 fulfill 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, molding 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 rumor. He should be reveling 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 farther 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.
