Dusk

by Tim Lebbon

  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 the 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, farther 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 makeup; 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 realized 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, cauterized 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 belowground, there were hints at its spiritualistic properties, the idea that its real use was as a perception-expanding compound more than as 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 that Alishia thought little of knowing. In her fledge-fueled 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 the 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 dreamland made that world, speckled as it was with the precious yet deadly stones of arcane memory, her naïveté finding succor 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 meager 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 naïveté 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.

  Chapter 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 a brief frisson of fear, ignoring many more. Searching. Seeking the perfect home. Hunting for a place where whispers were rich and rumor 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 traveled in memory and reveled 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.

  There it would sit, and listen, and wait.

  Chapter 11

  LUCIEN MALINI WAS less than a man and more than human. His single-minded drive, his reason for being, the one true aim that informed his waking hours and haunted him when he slept, had driven him mad long ago. Madness was no hardship for his kind; indeed, most of them welcomed its inevitable grasp. It focused the mind, excluded all outside considerations and drew everything down to a point. That point was as sharp as the tools of killing he carried, and just as deadly. And though insane, his mind was powerful and vibrant—and put to one task, it pursued it doggedly. He often spent days sitting and meditating on the purpose of his life. There were times when he shed his understanding of any language, any sight that did not in some way appertain to his cause. And this guided him unerringly to his end result.

  Lucien could go without food and water for a full moon, such was his mind’s manic grasp over his body. Its dedicated train of thought, consideration, philosophizing was so powerful that it could take control of his physical self, stretching the laws that governed its use and limits and, if damage was ever great, it could steer it ever onward until death overcame even madness. He knew that it would be a grand struggle.

  This madness also bred hatred. The extremity of his dedication transformed any intellectual consideration of his cause into an all-encompassing loathing, a rich, blood-hot despising of the target. And that target was magic. His abhorrence of it was bred into him and handed down from those who had first committed themselves to its eradication. He had perpetuated and enriched that hate.

  It applied also to those who purported to carry magic. They were equally sullied, equally guilty.

  Lucien hugged his red robe around him and started down into the valley that harbored a subject of this hate, a carrier, the first true carrier for a generation. This was what he was made for. Today would be the culmination of his life.

  Soon, when he knew that the others were ready, he would move. He would enter the sprawling, degraded town of Pavisse to find Rafe Baburn.

  THE RED MONKS had no god. They worshipped no deity, ascribed to no doctrine, prostrated themselves at the feet of nothing. They feared magic, though that was no devil, and their dogma preached little save the expunging of this fear. They worked for the land, though the land had not asked that of them. The Monks knew that magic was the true way of things, yet still they sought its exclusion.

  If they had true enemies, they were the Mages Angel and S’Hivez, who had taken magic to themselves and twisted it far past the flexing that the laws of nature were prepared to withstand. They had broken it over the rock of their own vanity. The Monks hated them fiercely, and they harbored no love for anyone to provide balance. Theirs was a philosophy of negativity, a religion—if it could be called such—where destruction was a high command. Seeking magic, courting its return, that was heresy, because should magic return, there would always be evil to take it again. And heresy deserved the ultimate vengeance.

  During the Cataclysmic War, the Monks’ predecessors had fought alongside those desperate to sa
ve and protect Noreela. The Mages’ power had been strong, their perverted use of magic more powerful and deadly than anything the Noreelans could muster. The Monks’ ancestors—pagan priests and academics who drove the war machines, combining and communing with the great constructs as they battled the Krote hordes of the Mages’ armies—died quickly and painfully, as did their charges. For while the magic of the land drove the machines and gave them power, the Mages’ twisting of this magic gave them an edge: more power; greater strength; the transgressing of life and death itself to expand their armies at an exponential rate. When one Krote fell, two would rise in his place: his revivified physical self and his soul, the wraith captured and tortured by the Mages.

  Yet somehow, Noreela won out. The Mages were driven north, out along The Spine, until there was nowhere left to flee. The remnants of their armies commandeered ships and sailed them burning into the unknown. And then magic left the land.

  Those pagan priests that survived the fighting had seen firsthand what magic could accomplish in the hands of the Mages. They had had their own close bonds with the machines cruelly broken, and now they were adrift. Nature had betrayed their trust and faith, and their beliefs mutated into an abiding hatred. Slowly, over a few years, the survivors drew together, knowing what had to be done. Magic was gone and it must never return, not while there was even the slightest chance that the Mages could reacquire what they had once ruled, start again where they had left off.