by Tim Lebbon
Monks cried out, crumpled beneath hawk feet, slashed by the riders’ blades, crushed by machines.
The land swam in blood.
And then slowly, incredibly, the valley began to fall away.
“What in the name of the Black-?” Kosar hissed.
“It’s going,” Trey said, looking down. “It’s going, it’s falling, leaving us behind.”
“No,” Hope said. “We’re flying.”
“Flying…”
Lights flashed below them and to the side, accompanied by a roar as the ground tore itself apart, freeing the trapped machine. The light flared, lifting them up on a pillar of luminescence. Bursts of a more firelike exhaust streaked across the valley from the machine, enveloping hawks and Mages in writhing flame, sending them spinning away like burning stars. The hawks streamed around the valley, ricocheting from rocky outcroppings and solid machines, dripping fire across the ground and setting the blood-drenched cloaks of Monks aflame. Soon the valley was lit by fire, though the hawks and their riders seemed to shake it off, rising up again.
The battle continued. But now, dazzled by the new fire thrusting them aloft, Kosar and the others were all but blinded to its progress. They saw glimpses of the scattered fires, but the edges of the machine that lifted them up obscured any real view.
Kosar had sat down on the shaken ground. He held on to the thick grass below him, as if that would anchor him to the spot. He was terrified. Trey glanced at him and Kosar grimaced back, shrugged his shoulders. The strange, it seemed, had just become stranger.
“Where are we going?” Hope asked Rafe. She sounded so matter-of-fact, as if flying was something she did every day.
“Away,” Rafe said. He was staring at Alishia, and they both smiled. “Away. Safe. I’m so tired.” And he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
“I wish I could do that,” Kosar said.
Hope grinned at him, her tattoos catching the death moon and turning her visage ghastly. “Scared, thief?”
“Aren’t you?”
Her smile remained. “Petrified. We’re flying, for Black’s sake!”
The machine seemed to be picking up speed. They felt the bursts and pulses of energy shed from its lower edges, and with each explosion they were pushed higher. Light simmered around the machine’s lower edges. And with each gush of motion the machine itself was changing. The ribs had thickened as some dull gray coating grew around them, pulled in from nothing. The spaces between the ribs began to glow with countless points of light. Kosar had once been caught in a storm of fireflies, but this was even brighter. Soon it was bright as daylight within the gray ribs, and then lighter still, so that Kosar had to squeeze his eyes closed. It lasted for only a few heartbeats. When the light faded and he looked again, there was only the vague background illumination left from the pulse down below. And he saw what the light had made. Between each rib, for the height of a tall man, a fleshy skin stretched across. Even now veins formed on its surface and within, flooding it with blood from nowhere, and magic was at work so close, so near, that if he so desired he could have reached out and touched it.
Their sense of velocity increased. Kosar looked around at the others-Hope, wide-eyed; Trey, hanging on to the ground for dear life; Alishia and Rafe, prone, the movements of their limbs perhaps due to the motion of the machine, perhaps not-and he knew that he had to look over the edge. He had never been scared of heights or the unknown, but what terrified him most now was just what he did know. He crawled to the skinlike edging between the ribs, knelt up and looked over.
Fires had erupted across the ground. Some of them were small, others seemed to have spread and a few of them still moved. They lit up most of the small valley and the dying things it contained. It was spotted with dead Monks. He could make out the larger machines in the firelight, most of them still now, limbs slumped down, one of them accepting punishment from a group of Monks without defending itself. Their purpose fulfilled, these machines were dead again.
There was no sign of the hawks.
The machine gushed another blast of light, blinding Kosar and sending him reeling back. The roar was immense and accompanied by another burst of speed, thrusting them up and up until, suddenly, the sun found them again. The heat felt good on his skin. To the west the horizon was a smudge of yellow. If they rose forever, perhaps the sun would never set.
No hawks, he thought. Of course not. They’d have no reason to continue the battle once we were away with Rafe.
“What do you see?” Hope asked.
Kosar looked over the side again. It was strange looking down into night from a position of daylight. He wondered how high they had come.
“Kosar?” Trey prompted.
“I think the fighting’s stopped,” he said. “The machines aren’t moving anymore. I can’t see the hawks.”
“They’re stalking us,” Hope said. “They have to be. It’s the boy they want. They’ll go back for the Monks later.”
“It’s Rafe they want,” Alishia said, “and they’ll get him.”
“Go back to sleep!” Hope said.
“Then where are they?” Trey asked. “Why don’t they just attack if they want him?”
“I don’t know,” Hope said.
“You pretend to.”
“But I don’t! I don’t know anything. It’s guesswork, all of it. The only one who knows is him and… and maybe her!” She pointed an accusatory finger at Rafe and Alishia. “And they’re not telling the likes of us.”
“So what happens now?” Kosar asked. “Do we just sit and let this thing take us wherever it likes?”
“What choice do we have?” Hope said. “We’ve never had a choice. We’ve been dragged along for days, never given any option, no free will. Everything that happens to us is fated. Maybe in an hour we’ll all be dead, or free, or somewhere we can’t possibly imagine.”
“That’s helpful,” Kosar said, but her words chilled him because they echoed what he had been thinking all along. No free will.
The witch stared at him, her tattoos writhing as she grimaced in annoyance. “It’s the only help I can give.”
“So we sit back,” Kosar said. “Enjoy the view.” He glanced down over the side again at the wide forests surrounding the burning valley. A’Meer was in there somewhere, dead, already graying into the land. He scanned the darkened treetops, wondered if he was looking right at her.
The machine rose higher and higher, light bursting occasionally from its underside. The air became cold, the sky above them darker, and soon night enveloped them once again. They could not outrace the sun, however powerful the magic that carried them.
They watched and listened for the hawks. They must still be there, Kosar thought. There’s no way that single attack from the machine could have finished the Mages, no way. Not after three centuries awaiting their chance to return. There must be more to them than that. “We should plan,” Kosar said quietly. “They’ll be coming. We should figure out how to fight them off.”
“Don’t be so stupid,” Hope said.
“And don’t be so fucking negative!” Kosar stood on the uneven clump of ground held inside a machine, glowering at the witch where she squatted next to the unconscious boy. “Why did you come along, why did you take it on yourself to protect him? When we first met he was yours and yours alone! Now you’re ready to sit back and let the Mages take him without a fight? I don’t believe that.”
“No, I’m not ready to do that at all,” Hope said. “I just admit that we don’t have a chance. It’s hopeless. How can we fight them? You have a sword, Trey has a disc-sword, I have a few false charms in my pockets that would barely hurt a street urchin, let alone one of them !”
“What do you know about them?”
“Enough to know we don’t stand a chance.”
“You know nothing,” Kosar said softly. “You know nothing because no one knows anything. They’ve been gone for so long that every story about them has been twisted and turned. They could ju
st as easily be sad, pathetic, weak old things that will drop dead at the flick of a knife.”
“They got here quickly enough,” Trey said. “They have their spies that told them what was happening, and they’ve flown from wherever it is they fled to claim back what they think is theirs.”
Kosar looked between the two of them, shook his head and realized that there was no point in arguing. When none of them knew the truth, what was the purpose of further discussion? They could only discuss supposition.
“But we have to fight,” Kosar said, and his words sounded so weak that he sat down and said no more.
“Fight,” Alishia said. “Yes, fight.”
“What do you know?” Kosar asked her.
Alishia smiled and closed her eyes.
TREY CHEWED ONa chunk of fledge-his final thumb of the drug, stale now, bitter-tasting and rank-and he tried to let his mind float out and away.
In Alishia and Rafe he encountered two areas of utter darkness, and he was repelled. There was so much in there and nothing at all, and the sense of threat told him that either could be the case. So much could be things he was not meant to see, ideas that were never supposed to be dreamed; and nothing could only be the Black.
He edged out into space and soared, his flight weakened by the bad fledge, the balance of his mind dangerously uneven. But he was free for a time, and he could see, and if he moved out in concentric circles he may yet be of use to the others. His disc-sword had aided Kosar back there against the Monk, but he felt no sense of victory in meting out death, however repellent the thing he had killed. Rafe was a stranger and what the boy appeared to carry was stranger still, so try as he might Trey could find no real nobility in their cause. He supposed he was fighting for the good, but that was something of which none of them seemed to know. They ran and fought blind. Rafe seemed honest, but did that make what he carried decent as well? Or merely deceitful?
There was no way Trey could know for sure, so he had to follow his instincts. And besides, Alishia was still here, beautiful Alishia, awake now and more mysterious and closed off to him than ever. And she had saved his life.
He sought the hawks and the riders that drove them on.
The space around him was filled with myriad signs of life, all of them small and driven by instinct. Flies, birds, one or two presences larger and more obscure but none of them displayed any purpose in their travels. Basic minds drifted and floated on thermals, some asleep and others barely awake to the world around them. There was no real intelligence here, and they retreated from Trey’s questing mind like smoke before wind.
He spun farther out, down toward the ground, sensing the aching distress of many minds far below. He reached out a tentative thought and touched on them, recoiling quickly when he found what they were; Red Monks, dead and dying, their rage dispersing into the ether. Even as they died they were mourning the failure of their mission, because many of them died on their backs, looking up. Up at the dark skies above, up at the memory of the vanished machine that had carried Rafe away. And up toward where the hawks had flown in pursuit.
Trey drew back quickly to the machine, casting about, looking behind dark shadows and trying to bridge gaps where things were obscure to him. Perhaps the fledge had been even staler than he had thought, or maybe he was losing his ability to use it properly, his mind polluted by fear or something far more subtle. He hovered for a while at the periphery of his physical self, still aware of those two huge areas of darkness nearby, knowing who they were, hating their inscrutability. Rafe he could understand, but Alishia…?
And then he saw them. The hawks, their riders, storming down from above where they had been drifting in wait for the machine. He knew their rage and disgust, their power and rot, and as he slipped back into his own body just in time to scream he realized that there had never been any hope.
They were all going to die.
TREY SCREAMED, RAFEshouted out in his sleep and something struck the ribs of the machine.
Kosar was thrown to the ground, landing painfully on his wounded hand. The thing that had hit them-a hawk-cried out, shattering the relative quiet. The impact had split two of the ribs and torn the membrane between them, and blood sprayed black in the moonlight. The hawk cried out again, still pushing forward, and Kosar could see the shape standing on its back. Standing, and preparing to jump across its head into the confines of the machine.
Hope stood and threw something in the same movement. Her aim was unerringly true. It struck the hawk just above one fist-sized eye, and something dark and fast spread down across the white of its eyeball, turning it instantly black. The creature screamed, its cry one of pain now rather than rage, and started to thrash itself free of the broken ribs.
The machine squeezed. It seemed to be using its wound to its own advantage, holding the hawk in place, crushing, the raw ends of the snapped ribs piercing the animal’s skin and slipping inside.
The shape on its neck was a woman, heavily armed and armored, tall and strong and scarred, no doubt one of the Mages’ fighting Krotes. She sat down to avoid being thrown out into the open air, staring through the ribs at the people she had come here to kill.
Kosar stood, drew his sword and smiled. The Krote hissed. The thief felt so empowered by this that he took several steps forward until he was standing within reach of the hawk’s trapped head.
“Who the fuck are you?” the Krote said. Her eyes were a shining, pale blue, even in the weak moonlight.
“A friend of anyone you go against,” Kosar said, and he lashed out. His sword parted the flesh of the hawk’s head and he stepped back as the thing tore itself free and spun back into the night. The Krote watched him as she fell away, and though Kosar knew that this fight had just begun, the brief sense of victory was invigorating.
“Trey!” Kosar called. “We have to protect this breach!”
“Gave the bastard a blinding!” Hope said triumphantly.
“What was that?” Trey asked.
She smiled. “Poison ants.”
“Are you crawling with these things?” Kosar asked, partly in disgust but mostly in admiration.
Hope’s smile diminished. “That was the last.”
There were two more impacts on the machine’s construct, one directly above them where the ribs met, the other below, out of sight, down where the ground had torn itself away. Kosar and the others went sprawling again, and the sound of the vicious hawks baying for blood seemed to shut out the moonlight.
Kosar looked up. Silhouetted against the death moon a hawk was standing on the pinnacle of the curved ribs, hacking with its huge beak and crushing them with hooked claws. Blood and flesh spattered down, and then something harder as the ribs were quickly rent asunder. If only I had A’Meer’s bow and arrow, he thought. The attacker was way too high to reach with a sword, and they could do nothing but watch as it tore into the machine.
But the machine was preparing to fight back. Pale blue light glimmered across several of the ribs. Like electric dust-worms shimmering together, the streaks of light darted across the ribs’ surface until they met, several bright spots forming just above ground level, growing larger, brighter… and in their glow, Kosar could see the face of the thing staring down at them.
A Mage. It had to be a Mage. He had never before seen such madness, hate and bloodlust.
It opened its mouth and hissed. As if the sound were a signal, the machine launched its counterattack.
Balls of purple light burst up from the glowing ribs and converged on the Mage and hawk. As they flew their shape changed, from unformed fire to things with definite edges, purpose, design. They struck the hawk’s feet and chest and erupted into a scrabbling plague of scorpions. Simmering light still played around the lower ribs, and in their glow Kosar saw the scorpion’s stingers rising up and down, up and down, puncturing the thick hide of the hawk and pumping it full of venom. More of the creatures crawed quickly up and over the thing’s head, saving their venom for the Mage upon its back. And
the Mage, wincing and cursing at first as the things struck, but then smiling, finally laughing, plucked them from its skin and clothing and bit off their poisoned barbs with relish.
More light poured out from the machine, the ground shaking with each eruption, and as it impacted the hawk’s hide it flowed and manifested into more stinging, biting things. The hawk shuddered and the Mage lashed out, sending bits of shattered bodies raining back down between the ribs.
Kosar brushed scorpion tails from his hair, spider legs from his face, and they melted into the dark. He felt helpless. The sword vibrated in his hand.
The Mage fell from the hawk’s body and jammed between two of the ribs. At first Kosar thought it was dead, poisoned by the things magically flung at it by the machine, or perhaps bled dry by the newly formed swarm of bats that harried its head. But then it stretched out its arms and started hacking at the ribs with heavy serrated swords, and Kosar knew that this thing was unstoppable.
It ignored the light exploding across its body, shunned the things biting and tearing and poisoning. It ignored everything but the person lying directly below it: Rafe.
“Trey!” Kosar shouted. “It’s coming through! Your disc-sword can reach it, cut it before its free!”
Trey nodded, looked up at the Mage, back at Kosar, fear and doubt in his eyes.
“Trey!”
And then the Mage was through. With a rending of metal on bone it ripped aside the ribs and fell to the ground inside the machine. Small creatures scurried from its body and flittered away into shreds of light and dark. Another purple pulse crashed into it, but the Mage grinned and it simply faded away.
As Kosar ran at the Mage, sword ready before him, Trey lashed out. His disc-sword caught the Mage across the shoulder and split leather and skin. It fell to its knees. Kosar struck with his sword and felt the grinding hold of bone as it entered the Mage’s chest. He twisted, leaned his weight on the sword to bury it deeper, and the Mage vented a shrill scream.
