by Tim Lebbon
“No, Mistress. You’ve always been the Mages, with or without magic.”
Angel smiled, and Lenora felt an instant stab of jealousy-she was aware of how she looked with her bald head, scarred body and black teeth-but she cast that aside, shaking her head and silently vowing to serve, for as long as she was alive. And even beyond.
“Lenora,” Angel said, “you never have to lie to me. You’re almost one of us. You came with us out of Noreela three hundred years ago. You think the same way about this bastard place, and you want the same thing. So we’re almost the same… except that you don’t have this.” She reached out and touched Lenora’s forehead.
At first, the point of contact burned. And then the sensation changed from heat to one of intense cold, a chill that would freeze air and crack rock, and Lenora’s eyes closed to usher in whatever Angel was giving her.
There was one single image: the death of Noreela. Lenora viewed it at the speed of thought-north to south, east to west, passing over mountains and valleys and plains and finding the same stain on the landscape everywhere: destruction. A city lay in ruins, buildings burnt down and blackened, streets strewn with smoking corpses, waterways polluted with rancid flesh. Farms and villages were equally devastated, their inhabitants laid out in lines and fixed to the land by wooden spikes driven through their chests and stomachs. Some still moved, flapping useless limbs at Lenora as she flitted by above them. An army lay dead on a hillside, muddied armour already rusting beneath the blood that had been blasted and crushed from the thousands of corpses. Carrion creatures ate their fill. Horses wandered aimlessly, their riders taken down and killed, the creatures too tame to fend for themselves. A great river was home to a hundred boats, all of them sunk, all of them filled to their watery brims with naked corpses.
And elsewhere, away from the bodies and the signs of a lost war, Noreela itself was suffering greater traumas than ever. A whole mountain range swam in fire, only the highest peaks still visible above the rolling flames. On an endless plain to the south the ground was cracked open, but instead of fire and lava rising up, the land’s innards rolled out across the dying grass, giant coils of earth and stone hardening in the twilight and venting scampering things as big as the largest hawk. The air was turning to glass, the ground melting away, water bursting into flame… the whole of Noreela was in chaos, and at its center pulsed the sense of magic gone darker than ever before.
“There, at the hub,” Angel’s voice said, a commentary for the sights Lenora was seeing. “That’s us.” And Lenora saw. The passing visions slowed, settling toward a huge wound in the land. The wound bled. In the middle of this lake of blood, floating in a boat seemingly made from the bones of countless victims, two shadows stretched and flexed, ambiguous in their shape and yet so obvious in their ecstasy.
With Noreela like a rotting corpse around them, the Mages’ wraiths writhed forever in the luxury of vengeance found.
Angel removed her finger from Lenora’s head and leaned back, smiling.
“The future?” Lenora said. “Is that what I saw?”
“No one sees the future,” Angel said, shrugging. “I showed you what I want of the future: Noreela drowning in the blood of our retribution. And with your help, S’Hivez and I will make it so.”
“You know you have my loyalty, Mistress. The boy… he gave you the magic?”
“You know he did. Why else have you been cowering back here near the stinking arse of this flying monster?”
Lenora looked down, ashamed and still terrified. “I’m sorry.”
“If I were you, I’d be scared too. You have no idea of this power, Lenora! It’s like being dipped in molten metal. S’Hivez and I have been communing with shades all across Noreela, and those soulless things shunned by nature are working for us already. They eat the magic and spit it out; it’s like food to them. They’ll take the smaller places even without our help, because the fear of Noreela will be their ally. And I can see what’s happening, here and there, north and south, because the shades tell me! We know that the Monks are dead back in the valley, and the machines are still once more. We know that the Duke’s army is weak and formless in Long Marrakash. We know that night is here for Noreela, and it is on our side. I can step from one side of the land to the other simply by closing my eyes.”
Lenora nodded, finding herself unable to speak again. The energy came off Angel in waves, like gusts of heat melting through her skin and flesh. She felt the whole of Noreela pivoting on every utterance from her Mistress.
“Our army is yours,” Angel said. “When it lands at Conbarma, you will be there to welcome it in, arm it, equip it with the greatest weapons we can make. And then you will take control of Noreela.”
“You’re leaving?”
Angel nodded, then turned to crawl back along the hawk.
“But where are you going?”
Angel glanced back. “You question me?”
Lenora looked away, shaking her head. “Of course not.”
Angel laughed, as if dismissing Lenora’s question. But she said no more, and left Lenora wondering what the next few days would bring.
War, for certain. More bloodshed and death than she had ever imagined. But with the Mages apparently intending to leave the Krote army to its own devices, Lenora found doubt stoking her fear.
LENORA SOON LOSTtrack of time. She found the consistent twilight unsettling, as if some angry god had taken a brush to the sky and wiped it from existence. To begin with, when the Mages cursed the dawn away, she had been able to keep pace with the time as it drifted by. But as that day passed and they flew on into the steady night, her mind had become confused. She found herself glancing around to the west, hoping to see the smudge of a bloodred sunset, but there was only twilight in that direction. As the Mages had taken daylight from the world, so too had they removed night, leaving the land perpetually between the two; no sun, no stars. Only the moons remained.
The life moon was a silvery disc, low down to the horizon in the east as if nervous at peering above the edge of the world. The death moon, bright and dusty yellow, rode high in the north. They flew toward it, and it seemed to leak some of its sickly hue across the landscape. There were those who believed that the moons were the remains of ancient gods, cast into the skies by a perpetual hatred and destined to gather as many souls to themselves as they could, in an eternal competition. The life moon was losing, and the death moon was yellow with the swelling of wraiths. Soon, the moon-followers believed, it would burst.
Lenora had no time for such religions. She had her gods, and they rode this dead beast before her. With the Mages here, there was neither room nor need for alternate beliefs. She was lucky, she knew; few people ever got to spend time with their deities of choice.
They flew on, heading northward for Conbarma and the landing site for the Krote army. The Mages let nothing distract them. Noreela lay spread out below them, waiting to be plundered and pillaged just as they had dreamed for three hundred years. Lenora could see larger towns now as they drew further north, splashes of illumination across the shadowed land, and here and there were twisting ribbons of light where people seemed to be heading into the towns from the surrounding countryside. She would have so loved to land down there, take on one of these cowardly groups and show them the true meaning of fear. Since the battle to take Conbarma the whole land had changed, and she craved the feel of her enemy’s blood on her skin once again, drying under the faded light which the Mages had summoned with their victory. But the hawk carried them onward, its dead tentacles trailing behind them, gas sacs still gushing at the air to keep them afloat, and Lenora knew that the Mages had a more encompassing revenge in mind.
There would be slaughter, and blood would be spilled. But first they had an army to welcome.
IT HAD BEENdusk when they left the machines’ graveyard behind, and when they sighted the Bay of Cantrassa below them, Lenora guessed that it should be dusk again. They had been gone for a full day, and she hoped that her
warriors had prepared the harbour for the arrival of the Krote ships. They would be only days away, perhaps even now passing the northernmost reaches of the Spine ready for their crossing of the Bay of Cantrassa. Time was moving on. War was coming.
As S’Hivez guided the hawk down to follow the coastline to Conbarma, Lenora found herself eager to dismount. She craved some time away from her masters. She was tired, her skin was burned by the cold wind, and her mind felt assaulted by the power she had been sitting close to for so long. They had not danced, waved or shouted; they had not revelled in the newfound magic, other than cursing the sky into darkness. Yet they exuded a sickly strength that set Lenora’s teeth on edge and sent her tired mind into a spin. They were like holes punched in reality, so distinct and yet so wrong that even she, their servant and lieutenant, could barely endure their presence.
For a while, the voice of her daughter’s shade whispered in her mind. Lenora shook her head and Angel glanced back, the Mage’s eyes a piercing blue against the dark sky.
“Conbarma,” S’Hivez said, the word like glass against skin. He rarely spoke, and Lenora had forgotten his voice.
She edged sideways and looked down at the sea to their right. The Bay of Cantrassa reflected the moons, surging waves rippling across its surface picking up the death moon’s yellow and spreading it like a slick of rot. The life moon caught the very tops of the highest waves, as though trying to urge them higher. She leaned left, looked down at the land, and saw the seaport of Conbarma nestled in its own natural bay. She was glad that the fires of battle had been extinguished, though she could still smell the hint of cooked flesh on the breeze.
S’Hivez plunged his hands into the dead hawk’s neck and brought it down, curving into a glide that would take them into Conbarma from the sea. They passed just above the waves. The hawk’s trailing tentacles skimmed the water, throwing up lines of spray behind them, and by the time they reached the harbour there were several living hawks aloft, their Krote riders armed and ready to repel an attack.
Lenora managed a smile. How their moods would change when they saw what this thing brought in.
S’Hivez landed the hawk on the harbour’s edge. He extracted his hands from its dead flesh and flicked them at the air, sending fat and clotted blood to spatter the ground. Lenora wondered whether he saw the symbolism in this, but she guessed not. Angel had always been the one who loved the stories behind action or inaction. S’Hivez simply existed.
The hawk deflated beneath them, spreading across the ground like a hunk of melting fat, and immediately its stink grew worse. Lenora glanced at the boy lying between the Mages. His chest and stomach were open, as was his head, skull tipped back so that she could see the hollowness it contained. She wondered why Angel had brought him this far.
Lenora slipped from the hawk and had trouble finding her feet. Nobody came to help. She looked up, hands on knees, cringing as her legs tingled back to life, and then she realized why. The Krotes were not looking at her.
The Mages were kneeling side by side on the ground. Their hands were pressed to the dusty surface before them. S’Hivez seemed to be chanting, though it could have been the sound of the sea breaking rhythmically against the mole. Light began to dance between their fingers. Dust rose. Stones scurried away from their hands like startled insects.
Dozens of Krotes-those with whom she had flown from Dana’Man and fought for Conbarma little more than a day before-had gathered around, faces growing pale in the moonlight as they saw who had ridden in on this dead hawk. One or two glanced at Lenora and then away again, back to the Mages, fascination overpowering the fear that must surely be settling about them.
It’s good to be scared, Lenora thought. That was what Angel had told her. The Mages had always been a formidable presence, but now.. . now they were something so much more. There was something so dreadfully wrong about the exiled Shantasi and his ex-lover that Lenora found it difficult to look directly at them. It was as though light was repelled from their skin. She thought of the shapes she had seen in the vision, those two twisting wraiths aboard the bone boat on a lake of Noreela’s blood, but she shook her head and looked again.
The ground had started to glow beneath the Mages’ hands. The surface was stripped, dust and smaller rocks flitting away as if forced by a strong wind. They stung Lenora’s lower legs but there was nowhere she could go to avoid the rush. She dared not move. This was something she had to see, and she realized now what the Mages were doing: displaying their power to the Krotes assembled here. They could have landed and talked to their warriors, but a discussion of the magic they again possessed was nothing compared to a demonstration.
Lenora stepped back several paces. Her eyes widened, her heart skipped a few beats, and the many wounds on her exposed skin tingled with something approaching excitement. This is when we see, she thought. This is when they really show us what they can do. Already they’ve touched the sky. Now it’s the turn of the ground.
The Mages began to rise from their knees to their feet, hands maintaining contact with the ground as though stuck there, and then slowly they straightened their backs, lifting their hands and seemingly bringing part of the ground with them.
Light burned into the dusk, and each of the Mages’ hands was lifting a column of fluid stone. The ground vibrated as the Mages’ actions upset the balance of the land. Rock growled and crumbled, and strange rainbows were cast in the dust clogging the atmosphere. Angel laughed, and S’Hivez’s muttering became louder, the words revealing themselves as something much less complex than a spell. It’s all coming back, he said, again and again. His voice ground stone together, and then the two Mages turned to face each other and began to work their hands.
Lenora could feel the heat from the molten rock from where she stood, and she saw other Krotes stepping back as their skin stretched and reddened. The Mages began to mold it, twisting their hands here and there, moving their arms through impossible angles, pushing and pulling, prodding with stiffened fingers and picking with long nails, smoothing with palms and nudging with the heels of their hands. And between them something began to take shape. Sharp edges appeared from nowhere; curves hardened; a globe of rock rose up on thin stony stilts. Angel laughed again, and Lenora shivered.
The Mages stepped away from each other, allowing the rock room to move and grow. More flowed from the ground, urged by a simple gesture from S’Hivez, and they molded this around the form already there, thickening the trunk and lengthening limbs. They added more, and more again, and then S’Hivez stepped back and lowered his hands.
He looks tired, Lenora thought. They have this, they have their twisted magic, but they’re not used to using it. S’Hivez looked at her through the heat haze, and she saw the black pits of his eyes. He scowled. She looked away, her skin crawling, scalp tightening as if the old wound there were about to reopen and spill her treacherous brain to the ground. A thought came, and she could do nothing to hold it back: He can hear me. She did not look at the old Shantasi Mystic to see whether this was true.
“Lenora!” Angel called. “A present for you, and it will be ready soon.” She threw a punch at the sea and a huge splash rose in the twilight, glowing silver and yellow in the moons’ contrasting light. Krotes ducked down as the wave crashed against the harbor wall, tumbling over and rumbling across the ground until it broke around the glowing sculpture.
The stone hissed as its superheated framework was suddenly cooled. There were cracks and explosions, and the sounds that came from the thing were almost those of something alive. And if it did have life, it was in pain.
Lenora could not hold back her own accompanying shout.
As the hissing steam died away, Angel appeared by her side. She leaned close to Lenora, and her breath was as warm as the stone she had just cooled. “It’s yours,” she said. “Your machine, your ride, and soon I’ll give it a life.” She turned away from Lenora and surveyed the assembled Krotes. “You’ll all have one!” she said. “Machines of war for
you to do what you’ve always been ready to do: take Noreela. Soon the ships will be here, and your fellow Krotes will follow you east and south and west. I name every one of you here a captain, and Lenora is now your Mistress. You answer to her, and she will answer to us. And the rewards at the end of this short war will be beyond imagining.” She turned back to Lenora and smiled. “I’m giving you my army,” she said, “and I ask that you use it well. I know your intentions, Lenora. I know your aims. I know what you hear and what speaks to you, but I ask that you ignore that calling until you have fulfilled your purpose. You’re here for me, and because of me.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Lenora whispered. Not long to wait, she thought. And she hoped that the shade of her dead child heard the promise in those words.
“And now… life for your war machine.” Angel walked back to the fallen hawk with the dead boy on its back. “Oh, S’Hivez,” she said, laughing, “even you must appreciate the symbolism of this!”
The Mage laid one hand on the hawk and the other on the dead farm boy’s arm. Beneath her hands the flesh of both began to shimmer and ripple, and soon the stench of cooking meat once again permeated the air across Conbarma. She moved back slowly, melted flesh sticking to her hands and flowing like thick honey, and then swivelled and thrust her hands at the stone sculpture.
Flesh flowed. Blood misted the air and moved as if blown by a strong wind. Bones cracked and ruptured, spinning through the air and impacting the rock, delving their way inside and crackling again as they fused back together. The flesh of the boy and the hawk melded and filled out the fighting machine, flooding hollows within its rocky construct and then building layer upon layer across its outside. Blood greased its joints. The dead hawk shrank as more of its flesh was scoured away, and the boy’s corpse came apart.
