Dusk n-1

by Tim Lebbon

  “I know a witch when I see one,” Rafe said, “and witches know everything.” He was trying to appear brave and knowledgeable, but he sounded like a child. Tears threatened and he swallowed them back. They burned.

  The woman looked him up and down, licking her lips.

  They eat people, Rafe remembered one of his friends saying, fear and fascination distorting his voice.

  “Actually, I’m a lady,” the woman said, “and I don’t quite know everything. Almost, but not quite.” She smiled, reached out quickly and grabbed Rafe’s cock through his thick trousers, squeezing and twisting it slightly. “Never been dipped, that one. I can tell.”

  Rafe pushed her away and drew his legs up, trying to force himself back into the solid wooden door behind him. “Leave me alone!” he cried, sounding more frightened than ever.

  The woman leaned back and laughed, stopped suddenly, then looked back down at Rafe. She staggered back two steps, her eyes so wide open that Rafe was sure they would tumble onto her cheeks. “Oh my sweet old heart!” she gasped.

  This frightened Rafe more than having the old woman grab him. At least then he’d known what she was doing-touting for trade-whereas now, her sudden fearful reaction was even more disturbing. He scared her, that much was plain. Her mouth had dropped and the tattoos elongated across her cheeks, like extra screams to complement the one that seemed to be building within her.

  “What?” Rafe asked, feeling a confidence building from nowhere. A group of fledgers passed by, their dull yellow eyes skitting across the scene as if he and this woman had always been here. From elsewhere a roar suddenly rose from the maze of buildings, alleys and courtyards, and he wondered whether the man had killed the tumbler, after all.

  “Come with me!” the witch said, her voice shaking. She stepped forward as if to grab him again, but paused with her hand hovering inches from his shoulder. Her voice lowered. “Please. Come with me. I can hide you. I can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help! Leave me alone, witch. Got a prong in your palm? I know that’s how you do it, stick me and poison me-”

  “That’s for charlatans and those that betray the name,” she hissed. “I fear you, but don’t put me down for what I have to do. I am what I say, and I do what I do to survive. We all know there’s no magic in anything now, don’t we?” She stared at him for a few seconds, unmoving, seeming not to breathe as she awaited whatever answer he would give.

  “So why help me? I have nothing. You can’t screw me for tellans.”

  “Such language!” the old witch said, and for a brief instant Rafe heard his mother in her tone.

  “Fuck,” he said, and started to cry.

  “Come with me,” the witch said again, on the verge of panic now. She looked over her shoulder at a pair of coal miners who were loitering across the street. Rafe followed her gaze, wondering what they wanted, sure that they had not even noticed him and the witch. A horse clipped up the dusty road, slow and tired, and the man sitting astride it was hooded and slumped in the saddle.

  Him, him! Rafe thought, but this man’s robe was black, not red, and Rafe could see his face, the heavy gray beard that hung down over his chest and stomach.

  The witch froze, seeming to sense Rafe’s brief flush of fear.

  “You’ve already seen a Red Monk?” she asked.

  Rafe frowned, wincing at the sudden sharp memory. “The man wore red…”

  “With me,” she said. “Quickly now!”

  “I have to find my uncle.”

  “We can do that later; right now you have to get off the street. Now! If you’ve seen one Monk and survived, there’ll be more yet. Though how you survived…?”

  She was suddenly not threatening at all. Rafe had been scared of her at first-those tattoos, her grabbing his cock, the simple fact that someone in this sprawling, ugly town had noticed him-but now he heard his mother’s tone in her worried words, sensed a level of concern outweighing any intent to hurt or abuse.

  In a way, it felt as if she knew him.

  “How do you know me?”

  “I don’t. But I know what you’ll know and what you’ll seek. I’m honored, boy, and amazed, and I think perhaps I’m only dreaming here. But for now no more, eh? Let’s keep our lips sealed and our minds our own. Get off the street, get hidden, that’s the priority for you right now. Follow me, keep quiet, and in a few minutes we’ll be safe and we can talk. And listen. Only I guess I’ll be doing the listening. I have been for all these years, watching and listening…”

  “I don’t-”

  “Understand. Yes. Boy, what’s your name?”

  “Rafe Baburn.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Rafe. I’m a witch, as you rightly said, and a whore in with it too. My name’s Hope. There’s irony in that, because it’s the name I took for myself years before I knew that’s what I’d spend my life doing: hoping. Praying to the Black and the sleeping gods and the bloody shitting Mages if I had to that… well, we should go.”

  Rafe did not understand the witch’s ramblings and he thought that perhaps she’d lost her mind. She showed no signs of rhellim usage, none of the side effects of fledge, and her breath smelled of old cabbage and bad meat, not alcohol. But she talked nonsense. A strange nonsense. A nonsense directed at him and about him. He missed his mother. He missed his father. And now this woman, this witch-whore called Hope, wanted to take him home.

  “I’m very hungry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten since… since I saw my parents killed.”

  The sympathy that filled her eyes could not be faked. “Oh Rafe,” she said. “Come with me. Then we can talk.”

  Hope grabbed Rafe’s hand and pulled him quickly into the mouth of a narrow alley. And they entered another world.

  IT WAS Acity within the city. Rafe smelled it before seeing anything, wafts and hints of what was about to be revealed drawing them through the alley; the strong, mysterious tang he had sensed up on the hillside, and the vague aroma of old alcohol that he knew from Trengborne. But there were other smells here too, rich aromas that seemed to emanate from the moss-covered walls of the alleyway, strong and weak, sickly and dry, inviting and disgusting. He breathed in deeply and gagged on the stink of shit, and his next breath caused a stirring in his loins as rhellim fumes stroked his mind. Contradictions and confusions accompanied him as he followed Hope away from the bustle of the Pavisse he could just understand and into the hidden city he could not.

  They turned the final corner of the alley. He should have expected something like this, he supposed. No varied raft of smells like that would come from a few vagrants sleeping rough beneath the skins of stolen furbats. But it still came as a shock when he saw the hundreds of people, the alley widening into a street, the chaos of a town that seemed so different from the one he had just left. Back there Pavisse was a rough place built well, a once-proud town turned sour after the Cataclysmic War had robbed it of magic. Here… it was newer, Rafe knew, but a place such as this did not thrive on hope. It lived off bitterness and crime, desperation and hate. It had been formed after the Cataclysmic War and was a product of it.

  The street curved into the distance, passing beyond view maybe five hundred steps away. Some of the buildings may have been the rear facades of those he had just passed in Pavisse’s main street, but back here they were deformed, half-collapsed, mutated by the additions and changes wrought by their strange inhabitants. A heavy machine formed part of one building, its use long since forgotten but its exposed innards curving up toward the sun, making room for a few tall, thin fledgers to lie back and chew their drug. The machine was rusted where it was metal, smoothed by time where it was stone, and there were bones too, the flesh of its biological parts long since rotted away and added back to the ground. The building had seemingly grown around it, and Rafe wondered what had been here first: machine or construction. Perhaps one had been to support the other, although Rafe could not now guess at which way this could have worked.

  There were more machines, sm
all and large, a few with obvious uses-those that had moved as transport, others that had probably once ploughed and planted in the fields-but most with purposes lost in the turbulent mists of time. They were all incorporated in some way, chopped and changed and altered as if those that had used them were frustrated at their lack of animation. The channels were there within these machines, the empty reservoirs and sacs and current routes that had given them the strange life they once lived, but they were dead. Dead as the sand beneath the dwellers’ feet, dead as the air they exhaled, dead as the corpses Rafe saw in the gutter in one or two places. There was a fledger, his or her body twisted and ripped from whatever had killed it. There was also something else, something that must once have been fodder because of its size, exposed ribs torn back and knotted by the accelerated growth, slabs of flesh and muscle ripped from its wet corpse. As he watched, disgusted and terrified, a small lizard darted from a rent beneath one of the larger machines, buried its nose in the fodder and darted away again, dinner in its mouth.

  The fodder shifted, turning its misshapen head and uttering a low, wretched groan.

  “Mage shit!” Rafe exclaimed.

  “Leave it be,” Hope said, walking by without giving the pitiful thing a second glance.

  Help, it hissed. Rafe looked down, but the fodder was not looking at him. Perhaps the sound of its plea had simply been air escaping its slashed neck.

  “Leave it be!” Hope said again. She’d turned back to him now, conveying the same message within her stare. Rafe glanced around. A few people were watching him. A female fledger, bald, eyes yellow as a rancid wound, beckoned him over with one impossibly long finger. She was naked, and hung from a twist of metal and stone with one hand. Her body was speckled with soft black spots. It looked as if she were rotting from the inside.

  “Fun, stranger?” she said. Her voice was strangely quiet, high, musical. Almost hypnotic. “Fun with me, stranger?”

  “Not with you, no!” Hope said.

  The fledger hissed and dropped from her perch, landing on the street wide-legged and crouched into a fighting stance.

  “Paid you already, has he?” she hissed.

  “He’s with me, yes,” Hope said. Rafe glanced sideways and saw that she had one hand inside her jacket. Furbat, he noticed, picking out a crazy detail in this loaded moment. Furbat jacket, so old that the leather was denuded of all fur, shiny with age, darkened with sweat and rain and who knew what else. This jacket had seen its fair share of years and places. How much of this had been upon Hope’s shoulders, and how much on other peoples’?

  The fledger hopped a few steps closer like a jumping spider. Rafe could smell her. Rank, rotten and sad.

  “Fledge, young one, stranger, a bit of fledge with my legs around your face, you’ve never eaten so well!” She thrust her groin forward and displayed the hairless crack there, like a jagged slit in the earth.

  Rafe could not help looking down. There were speckles of fledge across her pale yellow thighs, a mustardy trace that hinted at more drug within.

  “I won’t warn you again,” Hope said. Something in her voice brought a moment of silence, a period of nervous calm. But there were others watching now-fledgers, coal miners, people who simply had nothing else to do-and the fledger did not wish to lose face.

  “Screw you, witch!” she said.

  Hope brought her hand out from her pocket. Even before she opened her fist Rafe saw the fledger’s eyes widen with fear. The others backed away as well, suddenly having more urgent things to attend to. There was real terror here, Rafe saw, a rich reverence the fledger must have held for Hope from the first moment. But the confrontation was all about face and respect, and once begun, her pitch had to be carried through, one way or another.

  Hope held a handful of spiders. One was green, another bright orange, the third black. All of them were fat and fast. She lobbed them at the fledger and muttered something under her breath, and then she walked quickly away.

  The fledger leapt onto the uneven wall and pulled herself up, grasping at uncertain handholds and rusted projections before she disappeared up and over onto the rooftop, moving like the spiders she fled. The orange arachnid followed her up, while the other two went in opposite directions along the base of the building as if to outflank her.

  The fledger screamed all the way.

  “What was that?” Rafe asked quietly. They were walking quickly now, the screams of the fleeing fledger echoing from above. A small smile perked the corners of Hope’s mouth. “Those spiders, Hope. What were they? They were following her.”

  “Of course they weren’t,” Hope said. “They were only wood spiders. I colored them myself. I always carry a couple in a skin-sac in my pocket, just in case. Often come in handy.”

  “But why…? What do they know? The fledgers, the people?”

  “They know that I’m a witch. That’s enough. I’m a witch, I throw spiders at them, they’re going to run.”

  “No spells? No magic?”

  Hope paused and glanced back along the street. Like a stone thrown into a pond, the ripples of their passing had already settled back to nothing. The street’s life had returned to normal, and if she was still screaming, the fledger was now far too distant to hear.

  “No spells,” Hope said. “No magic. Because magic has gone. You know that as much as anyone.” She stared into his eyes. “Maybe more.”

  “But… I thought witches…”

  Hope smiled sadly and shook her head. “Not even witches, farmer boy.” The tattoos on her skin seemed to stretch to make her smile more solid. And even though her comment sounded dismissive, Rafe heard more respect in her voice than he’d heard for a long, long time. Respect, and perhaps fear.

  They continued through the streets, the warrenlike maze of alleys and roads and courtyards, all of them that much wilder than the greater part of Pavisse, that much more downtrodden. Yet the life here seemed faster and more intense, as if this part of the city was reveling in the fact that it was hidden within the greater whole. There was drinking and fighting and fucking in the streets. Bodies too, victims of drunken brawls or robbery or dark, seedy revenge. A couple of the dead were covered with ragged blankets as if to hide their wounds from sight, but each corpse was being slowly eaten. Rats, lizards, wild dogs, carrion snakes as wide as Rafe’s arm and four times as long, all of them emerging from beneath the buildings or out of the ground, snatching their fill and then disappearing again. Rafe wondered what must exist beneath the streets to give birth to such a variety of wildlife, all of it fattened on carrion. He paused, kicked away sand and stones from around his feet until he found solid ground beneath.

  Words stared back up at him, a language far away in time or place. Symbols and letters combined, all of them mysterious, and none of them for him. He imagined these words spoken as the strange whispers he had heard in his head, and the idea seemed to fit.

  “Hope,” he said. She paused and turned. “What’s this?”

  She glanced down at his feet and kicked sand back across the carved stone. “History,” she said, turning away again.

  More to ask later, Rafe thought. There were more things to life than he could have imagined, more than his parents had ever told him, and he felt small and alone in this place. All eyes seemed to be staring at him, and back here in the streets behind streets they mostly belonged to people he had no desire to mix with. Fledgers stared with yellow eyes, coal miners shoved him aside without even noticing, other people mingled and argued and occasionally fought. And the buildings themselves were equally as threatening. One tall stone block, drilled with toothed windows, was spiked with long obsidian prongs, thrusting out into the street and up at the sliver of sky. Parts of an unknown machine maybe, or more likely adornments, a few of the spikes held sticky remnants. Black birds darted down and alighted on the spikes, picking at the mess, screeching as they took off again and flew straight back up. Even they seemed afraid to land for too long.

  Hope turned right into a narro
w, uneven doorway, and glanced back at Rafe. “We have to go in here,” she said, nodding with her head. “I’ve been through here before. It’s safe.”

  Rafe looked into the doorway. The entire inside of this building was a machine, vast and old. Hope was hunching down and entering a veined hole that looked like a giant’s intestine, hollowed out by time, contents gone away to dust. Rafe stepped forward and watched her worm her way in, and he caught a brief but potent whiff of old dry rot. He stepped back again and bumped into someone, receiving an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. The face of the building bulged out above him. The machine-whatever it was, whatever strange task it had been built to perform-hung over him as if ready to tumble at any moment. Its outside was ridged and bumped with projections weathered smooth over the decades, metal edges rusted, stone creases worn.

  “Come on,” Hope said. “It’s not far.” And then she crawled into shadow.

  Rafe followed. It was that or remain where he was, lost, so far from his uncle Vance that he would surely never find his way back.

  They passed through the machine. It was dark and heavy. Rafe felt the thing pressing down at him, like a huge presence paused with its foot held ready to stomp.

  On the other side there was another, narrower street, the faces of buildings so close that Rafe could almost stretch out both arms and touch them. People shoved by to and fro, some of them eyeing him suspiciously, others ignoring him. He could see addiction in their eyes: alcohol; fledge; rhellim. And there were other forms of abuse going on here of which Rafe had no knowledge. One man held a fleshy bag in front of his mouth, breathing in and out quickly as his eyes rolled up in his skull and his face seemed to darken. A woman sat cross-legged in a window above the street, sighing as a swarm of insects drew blood from self-inflicted gashes across her shoulders and neck. He had never imagined any of this. He was a farm boy, just like Hope had said, and the more he saw the more nervous he became.

  “Hope,” he said, and the witch turned to look at him. She must have seen the panic in his eyes because she put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. Her tattoos smiled with her, and Rafe felt calmer.