by Tim Lebbon
“What do we do if we do come up against Monks?” Kosar whispered to A’Meer.
She did not reply for a long time. He was about to move on when she sighed. “There’s not much we can do,” she said. “I can fight them as I’ve been trained, you can join in with whatever passion you feel for our cause, perhaps Hope can poison them again or use chemicala. Trey . . . he’s a miner, not a fighter. Perhaps we’ll make a dent, and maybe we’ll put back the inevitable for a while. But we’ll die, Kosar. They’re difficult enough to defeat on their own. If we meet them in any great numbers, we’ll all die.”
“And Rafe?” Kosar asked. “What if Rafe joins in the fight?”
This time A’Meer’s silence stretched on, and Kosar did not ask her again.
“KANG KANG,” RAFE said. “That’s the only safe place for me to go, and the only way any of us will survive. Without me, Kosar and A’Meer can make it to Hess much faster.”
“I’m not leaving you,” A’Meer said.
“I’ll look after him,” Hope said. I will, she thought, better than you with your swords and arrows. I have much more than that. I have passion. I have a reason.
A’Meer shook her head. “I’m not leaving him. Not with you, not with anyone.” She raised an eyebrow, inviting any challenge to her statement.
At sunup they had climbed a small hill, and now they rested on its summit. From there they could see in every direction. North, back the way they had come, a great mist rose from the land and touched the clouds, linking sky to ground. To the east were rising hills that grew gradually higher until, beyond the horizon, they fell down into the Mol’Steria Desert. South lay scrubland and copses of trees, weak-looking and in need of more than water. In the distance, hazed by heat, the first signs of the town of Mareton was miraged above the ground. And west, where they watched for the approach of the dreaded Monks, grasslands stretched as far as they could see, rolling toward the horizon and offering myriad hiding places.
Hope scanned westward with her spyglass, a present from one of the many men she had entertained. Her indulgence for this particular gift had gone much further than she would ever have liked, but it was worth the cost. For a few transitory moments of degradation she had this tool, something that brought the distance near and could give almost as much advance warning as the fledge miner’s drugged visions. Hope no longer trusted Trey’s addled mind. Only minutes ago he had returned from another trip, unable to tell them anything they did not know. He had seen the red smear of blood across the land—Monks, he told them, hundreds of Monks swarming over hills and through valleys—but he did not know distance, direction or location. He could not even be sure that it was now he was seeing, and not the past or some clouded future. She had developed a grudging belief in his intentions, but his supposed talents were on the wane. She had seen his eyes when he came back, but he would not meet her gaze.
The others did not see things her way. She left them to their thoughts. She was only a witch and a whore, after all; why would they listen to her?
So she watched, and felt Rafe’s gaze on her back. He needed her help to reach Kang Kang, and she would give it, with or without the others. Without, she thought. Really, I’d prefer it without.
She had heard more stories than she cared to admit about that mysterious mountainous region to the south, and the Blurring that may or may not exist beyond. Kosar had been right in his assessment of Kang Kang’s wrongness, but only in part. While his judgment was based on a very subjective fear of Kang Kang and what may dwell there, Hope’s knowledge was more deeply rooted in the place itself, a more objective view. She was not only afraid of the place, but also aware that Kang Kang was afraid of itself. In those mountains of madness, fear was a tactile presence, as prevalent as air or grass or rock. It could be lapped up or cast aside, but everyone that made the journey discovered it at some point. That was why few who found Kang Kang ever came back. It was a wild animal, driven mad by its own ferocity and consuming everything.
“If we’re here to look after Rafe, surely we should listen to his reasoning,” Hope said at last. Her words broke an unsteady silence, one waiting to be ruptured by argument. “He’s the carrier of the new magic, he’s the one we’re prepared to lay down our lives to protect. If he wants to go to Kang Kang, I see no way we can refuse him.”
A’Meer, leaning back against a tree with her eyes half closed, waved a hand as if at a worrisome fly. It was a dismissive gesture, and the Shantasi did not even honor Hope with words to accompany it.
“What?” Hope said. “What, Shantasi?”
“Hope.” Kosar was standing by the two horses, checking them over, examining their hooves. “Rafe is the carrier, but does that necessarily mean . . . ?” He trailed off, looked down at the ground, back to the horses.
“Mean what?” Hope said.
Rafe raised his head and opened his eyes, staring in interest at the thief.
“Kosar?” A’Meer said.
The thief turned back to them, and Hope was surprised at the determination in his eyes. Whatever he had to say, he believed it totally. “Well . . . does being the carrier mean that he is any more special in himself?”
He glanced at Rafe, then away. The boy returned his glance with resolute interest.
“You told us yourself that it’s a thing inside you, Rafe, that you have no control. It’s another life living alongside yours, independent, a child sharing your life force and growing separate from you. But like a mother is not the child, so you aren’t the magic. Can you really claim to know exactly what it wants?”
All eyes turned to Rafe. This is where it has a chance to show itself and cast out doubt, Hope thought. She felt a tingling in her limbs at the idea, a tightening of her scalp, as if a lightning storm was gathering above the hills. This is where things change.
“I’m as important as anyone who has knowledge,” Rafe said. “Your mind is separate from the rest of you, Kosar. Your shade is still within you, somewhere, a remnant of your potential hiding behind your bones and within your blood. Yet without one, the other will change. Without me the magic will be free, but as vulnerable as a newborn baby. There are things out there that would eat it.”
“I didn’t mean . . .” Kosar said, looking down at his hands, picking horsehair from the wounds on his fingertips. Then he looked up again. “You never used to talk like this. You’re a farm boy, Rafe.”
“My eyes are being opened,” the boy said. He looked at each of them for a couple of seconds, even the unconscious Alishia propped against Trey’s side. “I know you all have doubts,” he said. “And so do I. The thing inside me has done a few tricks to try to help us on our way, but it’s been a long time. We’re blinded to miracles. Sheltered from the truth. But believe me when I say I know what is right.” He looked at A’Meer. “Believe me.”
“I don’t know—” the Shantasi began.
“We’re blinded,” Hope said. “Blinded by what we can’t believe, just like Rafe said. We’ve all heard of the old magic and what it could do, but do we really believe? You, A’Meer. Can you really believe?”
“Of course,” the Shantasi said, but they all knew the doubt in her voice. She looked away, out between the trees.
“Not far from here,” Rafe said, “there’s a place that will make you all believe.” He closed his eyes, and suddenly the life seemed to drain from his face, skin growing sallow and lined, flesh sloughing down, as if he aged ten years in ten seconds.
“Rafe!” Hope said. No! she thought, darting to the boy, holding his arms, pressing her ear to his mouth. The others were on their feet, gathering around. The witch felt Rafe’s breath in her ear, warm on her cheek and neck, and she closed her eyes, wondering what could pass between them should she remain this close. Here, now, inside him, a hand’s breadth away . . . but it was not really that close, she realized. Magic was still an infinity away. Even though out of all of them she believed the most, still it was as far away as ever.
“He’s asleep,” she said qu
ietly, trying to hide her disappointment from the others. Her confusion. Her yearning.
I’ll stay with you, Rafe, she thought. I believe you, and I’ll stay with you whether I eventually have what I want . . . or not.
THEY STAYED ON the hillock just long enough to have a bite to eat and a brief rest. Trey chewed more stale fledge and told them that the land was still smudged red, bleeding eastward, although he did not know how far away that blight lay. He grew quiet when Kosar asked, shook his head and looked at Alishia where she sat slowly fading away. They had all tried to feed the unconscious girl, force water down her throat, but with her mind torn to shreds her body had lost the survival instinct. Food fell from her mouth unchewed, and water drained away down her chin. And there was something else. They could not be certain, but she looked younger than she had before, smaller. Lessened by her experiences, perhaps . . . or maybe something else.
When they set off again, Kosar was consumed by a dreadful sense of foreboding. He looked at them all—Hope, Trey, Alishia, the terrifyingly normal Rafe and A’Meer, the woman he perhaps loved—and they were friends and strangers. For an instant they were characters in a story of his own devising, so close that he could never know anyone better, yet so unreal that their impending loss was a blankness within him. He walked close to A’Meer, brushing her arm with his, trying to see a similar recognition of their fate in her eyes, finding nothing.
Rafe’s request and the discussion back on the knoll still lay unresolved. Yet they headed southeast, their route taking them nearer and nearer to New Shanti and A’Meer’s intended destination. Rafe sat astride his horse and quietly let himself be led, though now there was a definable tension in the group. Rafe’s words seemed to echo back at them from the land: There’s a place that will make you all believe. Kosar had no idea where or what that place was—none of them did—but they all looked with new eyes now, trying to find hidden truths between blades of grass, epiphanies floating in the sunny air with the dust and pollen. Kosar hoped that they looked with better eyes . . . but still he feared that it was greed that drove some of them, guilt others. The purity of their intentions was yet to be proven.
Around midday they paused by a small stream so that the horses could drink. Kosar filled his water canteen upstream from the horses, splashed his face and neck and gasped as the cold water bit through the grime of the road. It had been a long time since he had felt like this. He had worked hard in Trengborne, but it had been a more comfortable life than he had realized at the time. His muscles truly ached, stretched and turned in ways they had long forgotten.
“We’re off course,” A’Meer said. She was standing in the shade of a large boulder, measuring its shadow with her eye, glancing up at the sun. “We’ve turned due south.”
“I never noticed us changing direction,” Kosar said.
“None of us did.” A’Meer glanced at Rafe and then walked away, sitting by the stream and drawing her sword. She plucked at her finger and blood smeared the blade. In the sunlight it spread thin and fine.
Nobody said any more about their change of direction, but as they set off again A’Meer led the way, heading away at a noticeable angle from the route they had traveled thus far. Kosar walked with her, but did not ask. Voicing his fear would confirm that control was slowly being taken from them, that their route was being planned and controlled by forces other than their own. That was not something that he wanted to hear.
They dipped into a shallow valley and followed the stream along its base, picking pale fruit and berries from the few errant trees that survived. Kosar sniffed at them. They smelled fine, but he saw a dead rabbit and something larger, longer dead, so he threw the food away. The stream led past small hills and back into the open plains, where to the east they could still spy the foothills of the mountains bordering New Shanti. Ahead of them now lay Mareton, the small town perched on the edge of the Mol’Steria Desert. It was here that they would take on supplies for their final journey across the sands. It was almost two hundred miles to Hess.
“Not far from here,” Rafe said suddenly, looking southwest.
“We have to go to Mareton,” A’Meer said, “stock up with water and food for the crossing, maybe get some fresh horses.”
“Not far from here, just a few miles that way, and something will open your eyes,” Rafe said again. “I don’t know what, and I don’t know how. I only know it to be true. A’Meer . . . a few miles.”
A’Meer glanced at all of them, and her eyes never changed when she looked at Kosar. He felt a brief kick in the stomach from that, confused and sad. “We can’t waste any time!” she said. “The Monks could be right behind us. They’ll have our trail now, and they won’t stop, not even out in the desert. Our only hope is to get out there before them, make a head start across the sands.”
The others were silent, waiting for Rafe or A’Meer to say something more.
It was Trey who spoke at last. “I want to see what Rafe means,” he said. “If it’s something so wonderful, maybe it will help us all.”
“And maybe it’ll kill us,” A’Meer countered. “None of us know anything about what’s happening here! I have to take this boy to Hess and let the Mystics figure it out. We go a few miles off track, that’s more chance that the Monks will trap and kill us. Perhaps we have the advantage right now—a head start, a few miles maybe—but what happens if we go off on some fool’s errand to see some mysterious ‘thing’? Remember what those mimics showed us? Monks. Closing in from the west. Trey’s seen the same! And you, Rafe . . . after all that, you still want to head that way?” She pointed southwest with her drawn sword, and it whispered at the air.
“He’s the reason we’re all here,” Hope said, “and I’m for following him.”
“He’s led by something mindless!” A’Meer said. “Soulless.”
“But it cares for us all,” Rafe said. “It would not lead us into ambush. Most of all, it cares for itself.”
A’Meer looked at Kosar, and for the first time since leaving Pavisse there was something of friendship in her eyes, an old knowledge, language without words. But why now, and why here? Because this was when she needed him most.
Kosar felt sick. “I’ll go with Rafe,” he said. “I believe it’s the right thing to do, A’Meer. Just a few miles, to see what’s so important. Then we can all finally decide what to do. And if Hess is still the best idea, I’m with you all the way.”
A’Meer cursed, shook her head and stormed off southward. She went a few dozen paces and then squatted down, the weapons at her belt scarring the ground. There was no pride, no dented perception of leadership, Kosar knew that. A’Meer simply wanted to do what she thought was right.
She turned around at last, stared back at them, and then past them. Her eyes grew wide and her jaw slackened. “Exactly how far is this place?” she hissed.
“I don’t know,” Rafe said, “but we can make it, and then I think it can get us away.”
Kosar turned his back on the Shantasi and looked the way they had come. At the head of the shallow valley they had just emerged from, maybe two miles distant, several red specks were moving slowly down the heathered hillsides.
“Then lead the way!” A’Meer said, standing. “Hope, on the horse with Rafe! Trey, up with Alishia.”
“I can’t ride fast,” the miner protested.
“Learn!”
A’Meer came back to Kosar, panting, and he caught the tang of her sweat in the air. It was a familiar smell and it brought flashbacks, pleasant even in the circumstances.
“You make me hard dressed like that,” he muttered, and to his delight A’Meer laughed out loud.
“We never did get to dressing up, did we?” she asked. They stood side by side, staring at doom as it pursued them across the landscape.
“Never really needed to.”
“No.” She shook her head and leaned in to Kosar, kissing him on his neck. “I love you, you old thief.”
He answered with a smile.
&nb
sp; “And now,” she said, “I suppose we see just how much Rafe knows about what he carries.”
Kosar heard the horses moving off behind them, and he and A’Meer turned and followed in their wake.
“How far away, do you think?” he said quietly.
“Maybe two miles. I saw at least a dozen of them in the valley alone. There may be more moving in from the west, heading to cut us off.”
“There’s no hope against that many, is there?”
A’Meer did not answer for a while, and there was only the horses’ hoofbeats and their own footfalls as accompaniment to their desperate flight. “Well,” she said at last, “no hope unless Rafe is right. And in that case, who in the Black knows just what we’re about to see?”
Who indeed? thought Kosar. Perhaps no one.
Or perhaps only the Mages.
THEY RAN. THE horses, exhausted though they were, seemed to pick up on their fear, because they put on a burst of speed that took them way ahead of Kosar and A’Meer. A’Meer cursed and struggled to keep up, but Kosar urged her to slow, conserve her energy. They might have a long run ahead.
For a while they moved silently, A’Meer breathing fast but steady beside him, Kosar doing his best to regulate his breath, control his pace, rarely looking farther than the next few steps. He did not know just how long he could do this. It was not something he wanted to dwell on. He glanced up at the two horses, still way ahead even with their doubled cargos. Hope and Rafe were in the lead, their gray dappled horse stepping confidently and calmly, while behind them Trey seemed to be letting his own mount follow the first, hanging on gamely to the reins, bouncing awkwardly, trying to hold Alishia upright between his arms while doing his best not to tumble from the saddle. He could fall, Kosar thought, he and Alishia could fall away and the horse will bolt. What then? Leave them? It was not an idea he wanted to entertain, but now the thought was there, in the background.
