by Tim Lebbon
Considering the state of his uncle right now, that may have been a blessing for Rafe.
“He’s not here,” A’Meer said as she followed him downstairs. “If the uncle knew anything of where the boy has gone, the Red Monk will have had it from him.”
“I don’t think he did know,” Kosar said. “If Vance wanted to help the boy he’d have known not to send him anywhere he knew. He probably wouldn’t have sent him out at all. And if he didn’t want to help, or was too afraid, Rafe may have left on his own. In which case, I think we should look in the hidden districts.”
“That’s a whole city in itself!” A’Meer said. “And why so sure he’s there?”
“I’m not sure at all, it’s just a hunch. Rafe’s a farm boy. If he left this house the natural route to take is down to the river, and that leads him past the outskirts of the hidden districts. And once there, a boy like that on his own won’t be left alone for long. There are whores, crooks, muggers and fledge dens. He’d have been taken there, I’m sure.”
“Of course,” said A’Meer. “Kosar.”
He turned and met her gaze. She was still afraid, but now there was excitement in her poise as well, as if it had taken time for the implications of events to sink in.
“You don’t have to come,” she said. “This is nothing to do with you. You’re an old thief who settled down on a farm, for Mage’s sake. You don’t want to get mixed up with Red Monks. Or me.”
Kosar found himself ridiculously hurt by her comments. She was right, this was nothing to do with him, and given any real choice he would steer as far from a Red Monk as possible. But he was involved, not only through his knowledge of what had happened to Rafe, but through her as well. He cared about A’Meer.
“I’ll tag along.” Perhaps she sensed how her comments had disappointed him, because she said no more as the two of them left the house. “There’s a quick way into the hidden districts from here,” Kosar said. “As long as you don’t mind the dark.” Any surprise A’Meer felt at his knowledge she kept to herself. Kosar had been here for only a few moons, but his type had a knack of discovering secrets.
They set off quickly, ignoring curious glances from passersby. Kosar led them back toward the river, and then ducked through an open doorway into a small square building. Inside he uncovered a hole in the floor, the vent of an old buried machine. “It’s not far,” he said.
“I’ll go first.”
Before Kosar could protest, A’Meer had drawn a small dagger for each hand and dropped down into the hole. He followed close behind, wondering what they would face at the other end.
Chapter 13
LENORA, LIEUTENANT TO the Mages, scarred from countless battles and her burning need for revenge, resident of Dana’Man for three hundred years but originally a Noreelan, circled her hawk high above the port of Newland and watched the preparations for war. Excitement coursed through her, because she knew where she would soon be heading. Excitement, and a calm sense of destiny moving things on. This moment was when her life would change again, and though she had been preparing for centuries, the actual instant was as sweet and satisfying as she had always hoped.
Below her, Dana’Man was a wasteland of snow and ice. A few lonely rocks protruded from the white blanket here and there. The stains of the Krote encampments on the lower hillsides were the only splashes of color, and it was so obvious that they did not truly belong. Mountains loomed above them, their dormant volcanic tips pointing skyward as if striving forever to reach the sun. It would never happen. This land had been cursed long before the Mages and their surviving Krotes had arrived, and it would remain cursed long after they left.
She circled, her hawk spreading its webbed tentacles to catch the meager thermals rising up from the town below. She could make out several warships in the harbor, their edges blurred by the movement of hundreds of people loading more equipment and weapons. Smaller vessels bobbed alongside, and farther out in the bay, constantly dodging chunks of ice many times their size, dozens more warships awaited the signal to depart. Even this high up there was a thrill in the air, a hint of excitement that Lenora had not felt for three centuries. Through all their time here—their catastrophic arrival, the battles that followed, the eventual subduing of the people they had found already living in this forsaken land—there had never been anything to really offer hope. Now Lenora thought that everything they had lived for down the years may well come true, something that even she had sometimes doubted. Fully armed and ready to fly south, she felt her love for the Mages glowing as strong as ever.
Their summons had come just that morning, and she had flown a hawk up into the Mages’ remote mountain keep. They had told her of the whispers from Noreela—the Nax awake, the Red Monks on the move—and she had not asked how they knew. They had their spies and ways. The implication of their words was huge; that magic was back in the land! She had seen the light of exhilaration in their ancient eyes, and Lenora left knowing that this was her last day on Dana’Man. She had packed her weapons and clothing without a moment’s regret.
Every breath froze her lungs, every thought was informed by the cold. This high up, Lenora picked up layers of sparkling frost on her face and clothing as the hawk drifted through hazy clouds. Her bald head glittered with ice. Her furs and leathers were stiff and cracked from the cold, but her blood burned inside, filled with rage and anticipation of the weeks to come. Soon she would feel the warmth of the Noreelan sun on her skin again. And then, when the fighting was done and magic was back in the hands of the Mages, Lenora would be free to seek her own very personal revenge.
There was movement far below, a hundred specks passing across the snowfields and then drifting across the harbor, rising higher and coming up to meet her. Her Krote warriors on their hawks. They all knew their mission, and she sensed their eagerness, heard it in the shouts and laughter that accompanied their approach. Weapons glinted in the ice-cold sunlight, and Lenora could not recall the last time she had seen so many of her warriors smiling.
They circled their mighty hawks above the harbor for several minutes, shouting to one another, waving good-bye to the snow and ice, full of bravado yet doubtless harboring their own private thoughts: relief and trepidation; excitement and fear. Each Krote carried arrows and stars, shield and slingshot, pouches and bottles of various poisons. Singly they were fearsome; together, in a group so large, they looked like the end of the world.
“Let’s go and find some sun!” Lenora shouted. She was the first to peel away from the formation and dip her hawk’s nose, heading out to sea. Warships passed by below her, then a couple of small coastal patrols, and then within minutes the sea’s surface was disturbed only by giant icebergs, and the occasional splash of something huge rising and submerging again.
Lenora had dreamed of this forever. As they flew south toward Noreela for the first time in three hundred years, she remembered the day she left . . .
SOMEHOW IT HAD all gone wrong. The Mages—the exiled Shantasi Mystic S’Hivez and his lover, Angel—had lived so many dreams, won so many rapid victories, drawn so much power to their sides in the magic they had twisted to their ways . . . and now they and the remnants of their army fought their final defense on the northernmost beaches of Noreela. Disbelief clouded Lenora’s vision. It was a hazy red, the color of life, as if blood were teasing her eyes before leaking away forever. She had no doubt that she was going to die. Whatever strange powers the Mages once had, the ferocity of the Noreelan people’s army had shattered her confidence, leaving it strewn across the Noreelan landscape and trodden down into battle-bloodied soil. They had been fighting for weeks, and the only end in sight was death.
The beaches here on this nameless island were wide, high dunes marking the dividing line between sand and the lush forests farther inland. Some of the dunes sprouted corpses, like sapling trees seeking the sun, and the hollows in between were quagmires of blood and guts. The dead outnumbered the living, and their majority was growing every minute. Several
days earlier the two Mages had still been able to raise dead Krotes and throw them back at the enemy—shambling zombies that the Noreelans could only stop by hacking to pieces. And ten days before that—at the Battle of Lake Denyah—dead Krotes’ wraiths had been forced into battle by the Mages, a nebulous army that could not be stabbed or killed. Now they could do neither, and each Krote killed merely reduced their army by one more.
The Krotes were trapped between land and sea, on a stretch of beach maybe half a mile in length. They were harried at both ends by Noreelans mounted or on foot, while from the forests beyond the sand dunes came frequent machine attacks. The Noreelan war machines were graceful things, long legs and scything arms that kicked or cut Krotes aside every time they attacked. Some of them had been brought down—their mounts slaughtered, the machines themselves hacked at until they came apart—but still metal limbs thrashed at the sand, and ruptured stone bodies leaked blood and other fluids as they thumped across the beach.
The Mages’ final machines had failed two days ago. As the last one ground to a halt and tipped over, crushing its rider, it was already stinking of decay. Lenora had stood aside in stunned disbelief as the Mage S’Hivez shouted and raged at the dead machine, throwing pulses of sickly light at its clotted arteries and molten metal joints. It had done no good, of course, and the Krotes had fled on foot. The Mages had drifted overhead, directing the battle from atop their hawks and sweeping down now and then to pluck up a screaming Noreelan. Several times Lenora had seen these unfortunate victims thrown from the hawks’ backs, shriveled and denuded from their brief time with the Mages. Loose-limbed and bloodless. Eyes sucked from their sockets. The viciousness of the Mages had encouraged her to keep fighting.
The sand beneath her feet was sticky with blood, clotting to her leather shoes and slowing her down. She tripped over hacked-off limbs and headless bodies. Someone grasped at her ankle and she kicked him away, spitting down at the wounded Krote’s face. His fight was over, hers was still at its height. If she remembered, she would go back soon to put him out of his misery.
She fought at their left flank, hacking at advancing Noreelans with her heavy sword. She had run out of stars and discs and arrows long ago, and she had lost her slingshot when it became embedded in a Noreelan’s spine. That had torn a swath of skin from her right forearm, and now sand was stinging the wound. The agony kept her awake and alive, maintained the rage that had driven her for days, ever since they had burst from the Mages’ keep and forced the Noreelan army back into Lake Denyah.
Then something had happened. Her memory of it was vague, its taste rank in her mouth, but it had been bad; a change in the air, a shiver through the ground as the land took a breath. At the height of battle, victory had been snatched from them. The Mages’ grasp on defiled magic had held for a dozen more days, but a purer magic had seemed to present a final defense, empowering the Noreelans to launch a counterattack in such huge numbers that the Krote army had been overwhelmed. For every ten thousand Noreelans they killed, twenty thousand took their place. Zombies of Krote dead waded into the throng, taking twenty with them before they were hacked to pieces. Wraiths spun and thrashed, whipping at the flesh of the enemy and opening them to steam into the night, before Noreelan priests managed to put them down. The untrained Noreelan army had gathered momentum, sucking power from the land and launching it at the Krote army with wave after wave of machine attacks. Surprised, overwhelmed, the flight north had begun.
It had been one long fight until they reached the sea. Days without rest. Nights lit by the flaming fat of burning bodies. Those who tired fell behind and were slaughtered. Those who fought gained wounds as their badges of honor, and a creeping madness borne of exhaustion and the inevitability of what was to come. Lenora—a simple warrior then—had looked again and again to the Mages, expecting them to throw down some mighty defense. Their magic simmered darkly around their forms, heaving as they danced across and above the battlefields. But if they did try to fight back, the effects were so small as to go unnoticed. Dead Krotes shivered on the ground instead of rising to their calling. Shadows flitted from the corner of her eye, but these wraiths were all but gone.
The Noreelans drove on, pecking at the tail of the fleeing Krote army with their loping machines, and a thick line of blood was painted across Noreela.
And then they reached The Spine, hopping from island to island in stolen boats, until they ended up at this place. At least before now they were on the move, and even falling to the enemy had felt positive because it gave fellow Krotes a chance to move on. Here, on this golden beach turned red, the battle was simply an ongoing slaughter.
Lenora screamed as she parried a sword blow from a big Noreelan, ducked down and hacked at his stomach. Coils of gray guts spilled out and he looked at her in surprise. “Help,” he whispered. She buried her blade in his face and wrenched, hearing bone crack as he fell. Another took his place, a woman already bearing terrible wounds to her neck and chest. Lenora gave her some more, then stamped her face into the sand and smothered her while fighting off a young boy. The lad was vicious and determined, but even when he buried a knife in Lenora’s side she merely shrugged him off and hacked him across the throat. It was just another wound, one more step nearer death, and the closer death came the more she was ready to welcome it in. The rage was good and pure. The fury at the unfairness of things—the Mages and their followers had gained and lost so much, in such a short time—drove her on, into the embrace of this new Noreelan attack. She hacked left and right, screaming, her bloody face terrifying her attackers. The day before an arrow had sliced off some of her scalp, and she had shaved her head so that the terrible gash would be on view. Several times her foes’ eyes drifted up to her weeping wound, giving her the opportunity to gut them with a simple thrust of her blade. The more wounds she took, the closer death loomed, but it became easier to mete out death as well.
Behind her, farther along the beach, the Mages were hunkered down behind a protective cordon of Krotes. Again and again the Noreelan machines sprang from the forest, strode or slid across the dunes and down the beach. And again and again the Krote warriors drove them back, at terrible expense. Hundreds lay dead, their slippery wet bodies offering added protection against the machines. Those left alive all bore injuries, some with simple cuts and bruises, others missing limbs or holding in their insides. Several machines lay across the beach. Their former Noreelan riders were little more than smudges in the sand—when they did manage to bring a machine down, the Krotes expended their fury upon its rider—and all but one of the machines now lay still, shattered and burned and melted by dregs of the Mages’ magic.
Because dregs were all they had left. Earlier that day Lenora had seen them rise from within the circle and direct a sustained attack of shadowy fire at an advancing machine. It had taken all their strength and concentration to bring it down, and even then their warriors had to advance to finish the job. A week earlier they had been blasting troop ships from Lake Denyah and scything down a hundred Noreelan attackers with a wave of their hand. Now the Mages could barely summon fire. Magic had given, and so it took away.
Still Lenora fought. Her faith in the Mages was as strong as ever; it was the devious magic she no longer trusted. Caught by the Mages, it had refused to stay caught. And though she still felt it thrumming through her bones, Lenora was certain that something was about to change.
The sun was growing weak. The air seemed lighter than usual, less refreshing. The trees behind the beach had started to shed brown wrinkled leaves, though they had only bloomed a few weeks before. Even when this battle was over, Lenora thought, its effect would have only just begun.
Her final memory of being on the beach was of a machine rearing up before her. Its legs were shimmering, fiery things, and its rider screeched, his face red not with blood, but with rage. The machine’s legs swished this way and that, scorching Krotes into charcoal shells. The rider fired arrows and followed every one with a growl. When he glared at
Lenora she was certain that she was going to die. His eyes burned so deep—
And then something struck her across the shoulder, and pain like she had never imagined took her away.
LENORA SOARED ABOVE and ahead of her Krote warriors. Far to the south lay Noreela, and that beach where she had fallen. Much farther south than that, nestled in the mountains east of Lake Denyah, the village of Robenna. This is where she had been born and raised so long ago—an unassuming sprawl of dwellings, shops and farms that had made its living trading fruit from natural mountain fields. She had called it home, and from there she had been driven—pelted with stones, whipped with poison-tipped sticks—for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The child was a memory now, drawn from her sickening body and taken into the Black one night in the foothills of Kang Kang, but the anger she felt at that place still simmered. Every act she had performed since then had been in the name of her dead daughter. At first she had felt only bitterness at the destruction of a life that could have meant so much. Then the rage had driven her mad, and the only place she found succor and acceptance had been as a part of the Mages’ army. The bitterness had matured gradually into an all-consuming hate, tinted by the voice of her unborn daughter; laughing, crying, telling her mother how much she would have liked to live.
Others told her it was madness, but Lenora was convinced that it was her daughter’s shade—her homeless soul, shorn of potential—remaining with her mother. Lost and useless. Abandoned and alone. And the only way Lenora could quieten that voice was to seek vengeance in its name.
On the day she was driven from Noreela, the voice of her unborn daughter fell silent. But Lenora had always nurtured that hate, and she had made a silent promise that, should the chance arise, Robenna would burn at her hand.
