Dusk n-1

by Tim Lebbon

  AS KOSAR LEDhis horse past the first skeletal machine, he thought he heard something move. He paused, turned in the saddle, met Hope’s questioning gaze. Perhaps it had been Trey working his way ahead of them, stopping here and there to look into hollowed metallic guts, lift rusted blades, step over something long since sunken into the ground. The miner kept his disc-sword resting over one shoulder ready to swing, though at what Kosar could not guess. The Monks were behind them, fighting A’Meer in the woods. Here, for now, there were only old dead things to keep them company.

  The urge to go back and help A’Meer was almost overwhelming. The cold way she had looked at him when she told him to go had been a mask. She had known that she was committing suicide, and that any acknowledgment that this was their final moment together would have changed her mind. She could have said good-bye, but that would have taken a second too long. She could have smiled and given thanks for their good times, but that would have been a breath too far. She had known that within hours or minutes of turning her back on Kosar, she would be no more. That certainty had left no room for sentimentality.

  He could help. He could draw one or two of the Monks away from her, perhaps lose them in the woods, hide while they passed him by, double back and do the same again. There were huge old trees in there, trunks hollowed by rot; deep, dark banks of bushes; high ferns. A thousand hiding places, and other areas where he could lay false trails, snapping branches and then working back. Striving together he and A’Meer could confuse the Monks, and in that confusion perhaps find their escape.

  It was a crazy idea, and he knew it. If he went back to the woods he would die with A’Meer. She was trained, her early years dedicated to preparing her for this one purpose. He was only a thief. Three minutes against a Red Monk and he would be dead. And knowledge of his death was the last thing he would want to accompany A’Meer into the Black.

  “These are all different,” Trey said. “Inside and out, they’re all different. This one, here… I can see right inside, and it has dried veins or bones strung like strings across the spaces.” He ran to another machine, chopped at the overgrowing ferns and mosses with his disc-sword, smoothed his hand over its surface. “This one: there’s no opening, no way to see inside. Who knows what’s in there?” Moving on, chopping again, hauling on a bundle of thorny branches to expose what looked like a giant set of ribs. “This one, we can all see inside. We can all see those fossilized things.”

  “Organs,” Kosar said. “They look like the insides of a living thing, grown hard.”

  Trey reached in between the stony ribs with his disc-sword, touched one of the hardened things held in place by dozens of solidified stanchions, thick as his thumb. It exploded in a shower of grit and dust, the long rattling sounds indicating that there was much more of this machine buried deep down.

  “I still can’t believe they came here on their own,” Kosar said.

  “You’ve heard of the tumblers’ graveyards, haven’t you?” Hope asked. “They’re scattered around in the mountains, dozens all across Noreela. They’re guarded by other tumblers, but there are those that have got through to see for themselves. Thousands of tumblers… they go there to die, mummified in the heat, rotting in the rain, petrified in the cold.” She looked around at the partially hidden history they were now intruding upon. “Once, we thought that tumblers were only animals.”

  “They’re not?” Trey asked.

  “They’re not,” Kosar said, but he had no wish to continue the discussion. Trey turned away again, exploring, fascinated by this place.

  “Is he doing anything?” Kosar asked, halting his horse so that Hope and Rafe could draw level.

  The witch half turned in her saddle, reached around and supported Rafe with one arm. “Still asleep,” she said. “Or maybe unconscious. And… he’s hot. Mage shit, he’s burning up!”

  “Let’s get him down,” Kosar said.

  “But-”

  “Hope, there’s no way we can hide in here. They’ll find us. And there’s nothing to fight with, if and when they… break through.” The thought of what “breaking through” meant for A’Meer did not bear dwelling upon.

  “And now are you believing? Are you finding enough faith to put your well-being in his hands?”

  Kosar shrugged. Rafe’s eyes were flickering, red from whatever fever had sprung up. He was nothing special to look at, yet everything was special about him. “It’s the last thing left to have faith in,” Kosar said.

  A scream of agony came from over the hill in the direction of the woods, loud and anguished and rising in pitch.

  Kosar shivered, his skin prickling all over, and he turned the horse around, ready to nudge Alishia off and gallop up the slope to the ridge. And what then? Down into the woods, sword drawn, ready to sacrifice himself to the Monks?

  “Kosar,” Hope said. He looked at her, momentarily furious that she had drawn him back. “Kosar, help me with Rafe! He’s burning.”

  Kosar steadied his horse and slipped from the saddle, easing Alishia down and laying her flat in the low ferns. She moaned slightly, eyes flickering, limbs twitching at the change of position. Later, he thought, I’ll tend to you later.

  Rafe was scorching. He grabbed the boy beneath the arms as Hope lowered him down and laid him out next to Alishia. Already the boy’s clothes were soaked through with sweat, his face beaded with moisture, and his skin seemed to radiate heat so violently that Kosar actually looked for flames, expecting the boy to ignite at any moment. And why not? he thought. The magic within has to release itself at some point, once he’s served his purpose. Why not purge itself through fire?

  “We need to cool him down,” Hope said. “Mage shit, I had medicines back home, things that would have helped.” She ripped at his clothes, loosing buttons and ties and exposing his chest and stomach, blowing on his slick skin to cool him. He started shivering instantly, so violently that his teeth chattered together.

  “Is it happening now?” Kosar wondered aloud.

  “Whatever, it had better happen soon. If he brought us here to show us some miracle, we’re in dire need of it. Look.” She nodded up the slope, Kosar looked, and there stood the first of the Red Monks.

  It was a bloody red blot on the landscape, a wound to the skyline, a rent in the perfect world through which a dread wind howled, its mouth wide, hooded head thrown back as it sighted its quarry. There were several arrows and bolts stuck in its body; one through each thigh, a snapped shaft protruding from its face, one pinning its voluminous cloak tightly to its chest. Yet it stood strong and defiant, like a standing stone that has seen ages pass. It was close enough for them to make out its woman’s face, and the skin was red. Blood, perhaps. But rage as well. This thing was at its most dangerous. Flushed with the fury of the hunt, enraged by the wounds it already endured.

  “A’Meer,” Kosar muttered, because he could not avoid thinking of her body ruptured and spilling its precious insides across that forest floor. Perhaps even now her blood was fading to gray, eager to become a part of that wrong place.

  The Monk staggered down the slope toward them. It was only two hundred paces away. Its sword was extended, bloody and glinting in the sun. It would be on them soon.

  “Come on!” Hope cried. She shook Rafe brutally. “Fuck you, come on! Do it, do whatever it is you brought us here for!”

  Trey had returned from his exploring. Instead of hiding himself away, he stood beside Kosar and held his disc-sword in both hands.

  “We take it from two angles,” Kosar said, walking forward a few paces to take the fight away from Rafe and Alishia. “It’s resilient, shrugs off wounds like a splash of water, but it’s not that fast. And its swordplay isn’t the best.”

  “Neither is mine,” Trey muttered.

  “You have that disc-sword,” Kosar said. “It has a long reach. As long as you don’t let the Monk knock it out of your hands, you can hold the bastard away.”

  “And you have that apple-picker?” Trey said, nodding at
the sword in Kosar’s hand.

  The blade thrummed, the handle was hot and steady in his grasp. “It’s tasted Monk blood before,” he said. “It’ll do.”

  “Until the others come from the woods to join their friend,” Trey said.

  Kosar did not answer.

  “Come on!” Hope screamed behind them, slapping Rafe across the face. The unconscious boy’s fingers were fisted into the soil, delving into hidden roots and routes, holding him there as if the world was about to up-end.

  A’Meer, Kosar thought, you must have fought hard. The Monk was close now, and there were several large areas of its cloak that gleamed with fresh blood.

  “Not like this,” Hope said, her voice changing from challenging to forlorn. “Not like this, it can’t all end like this! It’s so pointless !”

  The Monk was twenty heartbeats away.

  Something began to growl. Kosar thought it was the Monk, but then he noticed the thing’s head turning slightly as it too searched for the source of this noise. It was a high, screeching whine, like two huge swords being ground together.

  “What’s that?” Trey said.

  From behind them, Hope gasped and whispered, “It’s happening.”

  A few paces ahead, from where a flat machine lay all but smothered in a rich purple moss, a long limb slowly extended out across the ground. The movement was accompanied by a metallic growl as hinges, junctions and elbows that had been stiffened by three centuries of inactivity, rain, frost and sun began to move once more. It lifted painfully from the ground, rust the color of dried blood dropping away in a shower to speckle the moss below.

  The Red Monk had paused in its advance and stood swaying unsteadily a few paces away from this new, strange, wondrous thing.

  “Magic!” Hope called out, laughing viciously. “Magic! Do you like that, you red bastard?”

  The Monk hissed at her words, stepped forward and struck out at the long metal appendage. Its sword glanced from the limb, throwing sparks and rust specks into the air, and it staggered back with its arm held tightly to its side. The thing continued to rise, bending in the middle like a human arm preparing to throw. And it seemed to be growing thicker.

  “It’s changing,” Kosar said in disbelief. “Expanding. It’s-”

  “Magic,” Hope said. She turned to Rafe, bent down and put her hand to his face. “He’s holding on to the ground as if he’s afraid he’ll fall off, but at least he’s cooled down. No fever. Whatever was building in him has been let loose.”

  The Monk roared again, and Kosar and Trey raised their weapons in readiness. The rejuvenated metal arm of the dead machine might intimidate the Monk, but it would not hold it off forever. Their fight was still to come.

  The arm lashed out. It seemed slow and ponderous, too old to move swiftly, too heavy to shift with any speed. Yet still the machine snatched out at lightning speed. Its metal end-a club more than a hand, a fat knot of rusted metal as big as a man’s head-struck the Monk in the chest. An explosion of blood and spittle spattered the metal, and the impact threw the Monk back the way it had come. Its arms waved, its cloak billowing, and when it struck the ground the arm fell across its chest. Kosar felt the vibration through his feet as the heavy metal dented the ground. The Monk gurgled and reached for the sword where it had fallen into the bushes. But it could not shift the weight.

  Behind Kosar, Rafe mumbled something, then shouted, and then screamed, a cry filled with fury. His fists delved deeper into the ground and his arms shook, lifting his back and shoulders so that he was supported only on his fists and the balls of his feet. His shoulders vibrated with the effort of holding himself up. His eyes had rolled back to show their whites, lips were drawn away from his teeth, muscles standing out in stark relief on his thin neck and forearms. And his fists kept working, opening and closing, fingering downward into the ground to improve that contact.

  Something happened to his wrists. Sparks, Kosar thought, yet a cool, pale blue, powerful and full of energy but cold as the nothing beyond death and before life; cold as the Black.

  Rafe screamed again. The metal arm crushing the Monk sparkled and shimmered with cool light and then lifted up, curling in the air and fixing around the Monk as it tried to rise. The arm was not as solid as it had seemed before, its edges less defined. And as it tightened around the figure, its length rippled.

  The Monk struggled, thrashed and battered the thing that was holding it up. It was a demon flailing against the good, an horrendous vision of things unnatural and unwanted. But Rafe’s ongoing scream of rage piled more violence onto it, and the flexing metal arm smashed hard into the ground. There was a sound like a fistful of twigs being crushed, amplified a hundred times. This time the Monk did not even scream. The arm lifted it again-the Monk’s own arms still waving, but weakly now; legs dangling uselessly-wavered for a few seconds, flipped it over and crashed down again. The Monk’s head hit something solid beneath the pretty purple heathers. When the arm lifted once more, its skull was ruptured and leaking.

  It bashed the corpse down another three times before dropping it into a growth of high ferns. It almost seemed to Kosar that the reanimated machine wanted to hide the awful sight from these terrified, amazed humans.

  The small valley was filled with a few seconds of stunned silence. Rafe was calm again, as if sleeping, and the machine was completely still, as hidden away as it had been only moments before. The whole attack had taken less than a minute.

  And then the noises began. Stealthy, secretive, rustling and whispering from the undergrowth, groans and squeals of metal and stone things moving after an age lying still. A bush shimmered here, grass shifted there, ferns waved at the sky and were then still again, a tree on the opposite slope seemed to bend at an impossible angle before springing back, shedding a shower of leaves.

  Kosar tore his eyes away from the sight and hurried over to Rafe and Hope. “Is he awake?”

  The witch shook her head. “Still unconscious. Calmer now, though.” She was staring past Kosar, past Trey. “Did you see? Do you know what that was?”

  “A machine,” Kosar said.

  “A living machine, moving and functioning!”

  “They’re waking all around us,” Kosar said.

  Hope looked down at Rafe, stroked his face, wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of her dress. “He’s saving us.”

  “We’re not saved yet. And it’s not him. I think Rafe is farther from us than ever right now.” Kosar looked at Alishia where she lay nearby, struck by the similarity between the two unconscious people.

  Hope’s eyes sparkled with life, her tattoos stretched her face into the sort of smile Kosar had never seen there before. It was not a pleasant image. She seemed on the verges of madness. “Maybe we can get out of this,” she said.

  “Did you see how that thing crushed him?” Trey asked. “It took seconds. If more of those Monks find us here they won’t last long! We’ll be safe, we’ll be saved.”

  “And what of A’Meer?” Kosar asked, hating the petulance in his voice but sick at the unfairness of it all. Had she sacrificed herself needlessly? “Is this magic so cruel? Does it kill its protectors that easily?”

  “She did what she thought was best,” Hope said.

  “Look!” Trey was pointing up at the ridge between the valley and the forest, where several figures had appeared. The Red Monks stood staring down into the valley, the breeze flapping their cloaks around them, and more were joining them all the time. Some were wounded, but most were not.

  “She held them off for a while, at least,” Trey said.

  “Damn it!”

  “Kosar, she held them off. If that first one had come through any earlier maybe it would have reached us before we got here. We could be dead now, and it would have got to Rafe before the magic had a chance to start anything. Now… look around! She gave Rafe time. And it’s working for all of us.”

  “We have no idea what’s happening here,” Kosar said. But he did not take his eyes
from the Monks still appearing across the ridgeline above them. His sword throbbed in his hand and his heart beat fast, the need for action and revenge rich in his veins. There were so many of them here now, maybe thirty or more, that the idea of A’Meer still being alive somewhere in the forest was foolish in the extreme.

  “So what do we do?” Trey said. “Do we just stay here, let them come?”

  “What else can we do?” Kosar said.

  Hope’s grin was still there, that mad grin. “Let them come and try to take the boy. They’ll see what it is they’re fighting. They’ll know the true power of what they hate.” She touched Rafe’s arm, muttered a few words beneath her breath and waved her other hand over the ground beside her. The smile slipped for a few seconds as whatever she was attempting seemed to fail. But then she looked up again and caught Kosar’s eye. “There’s plenty of time.”

  Something rose out of a patch of ferns across the valley, lifting its head from the greenery like a huge snake looking for danger or prey. But this thing had no eyes, no ears, no mouth that Kosar could make out. It was dull black like polished stone. It rose to the height of a man and stayed there, solid, not swaying or shifting in the breeze. The Monks were watching too, some of them pointing, some of them waving their swords at this manifestation of all they hated. A’Meer had been cured and the flooded River San crossed, but here and now the magic was touching and changing the land, establishing itself in the arcane corpses of these old dead machines, moving out of wherever it had been hiding.

  And here, facing it in this fledgling state, was the greatest force that existed to ensure its nonreturn. The Red Monks began to howl and screech, voices twisted into something monstrous. They waved their swords and cried out their defiance, anger and hate.

  The thing across the valley did not move but was joined by other shifting shapes, several more columns rising around it and shimmering in the fading daylight. The surfaces of these new things seemed to flicker, moving like oil on water, colorless but constantly shifting and confounding to the eye.