Dawn (16 page)

“MAGIC’S BACK IN
the land,” he said. “The Mages have it. I was with the boy it was being reborn into, and they stole him away and killed him and took it for themselves. They made the skies grow dark. It’s the beginning of their revenge.”

“Shut up, scummer!”

Kosar felt A’Meer’s sword prick his back and urge him on. He winced at the feeling of metal parting his skin, and the warm dribble of blood that followed.
At least the blade’s blooded,
he thought. The wound was not deep but it stung. Schiff’s voice had changed. Before it had been dismissive and harsh, now there was more thought behind it.
He’s going to kill me,
Kosar thought.
For some reason I scare him, and he’ll kill me as soon as we get down, run me through with the sword A’Meer gave me, but he’ll do it in front of his Breaker clan to show that he’s protecting them from whatever new rot has set into the land.

“Why don’t you believe me?” Kosar said.

“Move on or I’ll help you on your way.”

“You’ve been looking for it forever, and now when it’s actually
here,
in the land instead of rotting away in old machines that were dead before you were an itch in your father’s cock, you’re not even close to ready—”

The sword pricked in again, digging into Kosar’s right shoulder above the shoulder blade, splitting skin and flesh, and Kosar fell forward and spun at the same time, landing on his side and kicking out at Schiff’s legs. The path cut into the side of the cliff was barely wide enough for two people and, with the other Breakers behind him, Schiff had nowhere to go. Kosar was confident that one good kick would send the Breaker tumbling from the path.

His right foot connected with Schiff’s left leg. Schiff did not move, and Kosar cried out as pain tore up his leg and into his hip. He kicked again and Schiff stepped back, swinging out with the sword, sweeping it across the path in an arc that would take off Kosar’s foot. Kosar pulled back, cringing as the wound in his shoulder gushed.
More blood spilled,
he thought.
I can’t have much left.
The sword scraped across the path and sparks flew.

Schiff grinned. He moved back a step or two, forcing the other two Breakers back behind him, and pulled at his trouser leg. It rose away from his foot and gathered at his knee, and Kosar saw the fires reflected on the metal skin of his leg. “Machines give us everything we need,” he said.

“But I’ve seen them alive,” Kosar said. And for the first time, he saw something like belief in the Breaker’s eyes.

“I’m going to fucking kill you, scummer,” Schiff whispered.

“Why?” Kosar said. He was bracing himself against the ground, testing his right arm to make sure he could lever himself upward. The wound on his shoulder was painful, but it didn’t appear to have damaged the muscles. As soon as Schiff was distracted he was going to launch himself at the big Breaker and shove him from the path.
Easy,
he thought.
Piece of piss, as Hope would say.

Schiff seemed unable to answer Kosar’s question.

Kosar glanced over Schiff’s shoulder at the woman. She looked confused, and scared. “Because with magic back, your lives mean nothing,” he said. “That’s why. I’ve brought a truth you can’t bear.”

“Schiff, what’s he—?”

Schiff turned, already starting to shout at the woman, and Kosar pushed himself up from the path. A stone rolled beneath his hand, his shoulder jarred and the wound seemed to stab at him again. He cursed and pushed harder, tearing a muscle in his shoulder and adding to the pain already nestling there. The woman’s eyes opened wider as she stared past Schiff at Kosar. Kosar saw fire reflected there, yellow then red, as though her eyes were slowly filling with blood, and Schiff started to turn back, sword rising, legs bracing, mouth opening in a scream of rage and realization.
He believes me,
Kosar thought,
and I’ve made his life meaningless.

Kosar stood and drove forward, striking Schiff across the nose with his elbow and feeling the crunch of cartilage giving way. The Breaker’s piercings tinkled and scraped as they were ground together.

Schiff roared, swinging his arm, but Kosar had pushed himself into the Breaker’s fighting circle and the sword slapped harmlessly across his lower back.
Five heartbeats,
he thought,
that’s all it’ll take, five heartbeats to draw back and stab in and then A’Meer’s father’s sword will gut me.
He thought much, much more in those few moments, a slew of images rather than words: Rafe raising the boat from the River San; watching A’Meer in the Broken Arm without her knowing he was there, the way her plaits swung, her constant wry smile; running across the plain toward the Gray Woods, fearing the Monks behind them and having no idea of what they were about to face; the machines, rising; the Mages, falling out of the sunset; the darkness. And he realized that he had never been this close to death before.

The other male Breaker screamed.

Kosar looked over Schiff’s shoulder.

The Breaker was behind the woman, ten steps back along the path, and he was staring down at a sword protruding from his chest. Behind him, a flash of red. And above this confusion of colors, a face, teeth bared and eyes blacker than mere darkness.

“Monk!” the woman shouted. Her voice was low and rough, as if her throat were already slit.

The Red Monk lifted the Breaker with the sword through his chest, pivoted and leaned forward. The man shrieked, waving his arms and legs, then slid from the sword and fell. When he struck the rocks his scream ceased, replaced by the thuds and crunches of his body tumbling to the foot of the cliff.

The woman backed toward Kosar and Schiff, but the Monk was on her quickly, a blur of robe and glittering sword sweeping her from the cliff path. She did not scream as she fell into the dark.

Kosar shoved against Schiff but stumbled over his own ankles, falling down again. He remembered fighting the Monk in the square in Pavisse. Now he did not even have a sword.

Schiff stood his ground. Kosar had a fleeting sense of respect for this Breaker, hefting a strange sword and planting his feet on the narrow cliff path in readiness to take on a Red Monk. But then the demon strode in, grunting as Schiff buried the sword in its shoulder, pushing itself further onto the blade until it was close enough to strike out and bury its own in Schiff’s gut.

The Breaker screamed. His hands went to the wound, leaving Kosar’s sword protruding from the Red Monk, and the Monk glared down at Kosar.

“I know you,” it said. Its voice was deep, and belonged to this darkness.

The Monk lifted Schiff and jerked its arms, tearing the blade up through the Breaker’s stomach until it reached his ribs, and all the time Schiff was screaming and crying, thrashing at the Monk standing just beyond his reach. He was hanging out over space now, with the demon standing at the edge of the path seemingly unafraid of the drop before it.

Kosar pushed himself up, ran at the Red Monk and shouldered into it. For a terrible instant he imagined that nothing would happen. He would bounce from the Monk just as his foot had rebounded from Schiff’s metallic leg; the Monk would drop Schiff after his companions, turn around, place the point of the bloody sword against Kosar’s throat and push.

I know you,
it had said.

The Monk toppled over the edge of the narrow path. It held on to its sword lodged in Schiff ’s stomach, so the two of them fell together. The Breaker screamed. The Monk made no sound at all.

Kosar watched them bounce from rocks and hit the ground, their impact illuminated by the giant fires. The Monk lay with arms and legs outstretched, its robe settling around it like a dead bird’s wings. The Breaker’s back was broken. The sword glistened in his belly. Beside them, the remains of the other two fallen seemed to shift in the echo of flames.

Kosar looked along the ravine and saw movement there, shapes darting between buildings, several more gathered in the heart of what must once have been a giant machine. It rose around them, ribs or struts or limbs curving up out of the ground as though the machine had died emerging, or trying to bury itself. It framed the Breakers against the fire. They had spent untold years gutting and deconstructing it, and now they hid behind it.

More shapes were slipping from shadow to shadow, coming closer to the foot of the path. Even if they did try to chase him down, Kosar was confident he could make it out of the ravine before the Breakers reached him. But he had lost his sword. He had a long way to go before he reached Hess, and between here and there were untold dangers. He had never been a fighter, but that metal had made him feel safer—perhaps because it had been given to him by A’Meer.

The first Breaker reached the foot of the path and started up, and Kosar turned to flee.

But then he saw more movement below. The Monk had shifted, brought in its arms and legs and was slowly rising to its feet.

I know you,
it had said.

It reached out and prised its weapon from the dead Breaker’s gut, before tugging A’Meer’s sword from its own shoulder. It looked up directly at Kosar. From this distance he could not see the thing’s eyes, but flickering light from the fires seemed to make some connections between the two of them. And when the Monk started limping toward the village and those hiding there, Kosar found himself silently urging it on.

The Breaker at the foot of the path spotted the Red Monk coming toward him. He obviously knew what he was seeing, and sprinted back to the small village, ducking in behind the big machine and adding his shadow to the others hiding there. Above the roar of the giant fires, Kosar could hear shouting from the houses, echoing back into caves that were invisible from this angle. They sounded like the calls of an injured, cornered animal, terrified yet filled with fury.

The Monk reached the village. Kosar heard a crossbow being fired, and immediately he was taken back to Trengborne, watching a Red Monk ride into the village and slaughter every person there in its relentless search for Rafe Baburn.

The Monk grunted, then walked on.

It fell a hundred steps!

It met the first Breaker and killed her with one swipe of its sword.

When it came to the harvested machine, the Monk paused, as if waiting for magic to erupt and set the machine upon it. And then, when nothing happened, the Monk entered into battle.

Kosar sat on the path and watched the slaughter. He felt bad for the Breakers—especially when he saw several small shapes dart from a house straight into the Monk’s path—but he could not forget that they had been readying to kill him. They had been brainwashed by their ancestors into believing that they could gain magic by breaking. They were, he supposed, as much victims of the Mages as anyone in Noreela. And now their harsh world had turned harsher.

The Monk fought past the machine, leaving dead and dying in its wake. Shadows emerged from houses and tried to flee, but the Monk ran them down and killed them. It crossed the stream, pushing through the waist-high water. It knocked aside crossbow bolts with the two swords, taking several hits in its torso and limbs, and then attacked those on the other side. The ones who fought back, it killed quickly; those who fled, the Monk seemed to take its time over. It was a demon, a monster, a killer risen from the ashes of dead magic, and now it fought in a world where new magic had made it redundant.

Kosar wondered what the thing was feeling and thinking right now. Was this revenge killing, a rage-filled slaughter? Or was it simply killing out of habit?

He knew he should have left. The fighting went on for half an hour, the final few minutes punctuated only by a single, mournful scream. But he sat and watched. And when the Monk emerged from the Breaker village, strode past the old machine and ran to the foot of the cliff path, Kosar found that he could barely stand. The wound on his back was sticky with blood, and his crunched nose meant that he could only breathe through his mouth. He swayed, trying to retain the knowledge of which way was up and down, as the Red Monk ran up the path toward him.

Both swords raised.

Kosar tumbled forward. In his delirium, he decided that a quick fall and death on the rocks would be better than being hacked to pieces.
I know you,
the Monk had said. So Kosar fell into space. He heard the Monk panting and wheezing, bloody bubbles bursting on its lips.

A hand closed around his ankle and pulled. Kosar pivoted flat against the cliff face, staring down at the dead Breakers spread on the rocks below, and was jerked over rough rock.

As he was turned onto his back, he stared into the face of the demon.

Chapter 7

TIME LOST MEANING.
It had started when day and night were stolen away, and now their bodies had begun to rebel. Hope would sit and mutter to herself when they paused to rest, cross-legged and staring southward like a figurehead on a long-lost ship, arms jerking with muscular spasms every time she tried to lie down. She cursed and spat and spoke in languages Trey could never know. But sometimes a sense of calm came over her and she watched Alishia. Always Alishia.

The girl would wake into confusion and disorientation, blinking in the dusk like a cave rat that had never seen the light. She ate a little, drank less and found it difficult to stand unaided. She said that her bones ached and her joints felt as though they were grinding together, and when Trey went to lift her she would cry out in pain.

The constant level of subdued light should have been a comfort to Trey, but he had never felt so disturbed. The fledge rage was strong in him now. When he walked with Alishia across his back, he thought of what fledge looked like, how it smelled and tasted, how it felt between blind hands down in the utter darkness of the mines. He was young and still learning, but older miners had told him how they could identify fledge from different seams through touch alone, how they could tell whether it was fresh or stale by the texture and moisture content and how they knew from the first touch on their tongues whether or not it was going to give them a good journey.

Trey so wished to travel with fledge, now that all he could do was walk. How he wanted to sit back and hover above his body, look down and see himself spread-eagled on the ground, launch his questing mind into the twilight to discover whole truths he had never even guessed at. He could dip down into Hope’s mind and see the volumes of danger of which Alishia had spoken. He could visit Alishia where she slept, troubled and in pain, and ask whether this was really the right thing to do. And he could move farther afield. Kang Kang lay ahead of them, and it pressed against him like a physical force, urging him to turn and flee the way he had come. It was an impassable wall of stone in a wide-open cave, immovable and daunting. He could explore.

With fledge he could do anything. He found himself sniffing for it with every breath he took.

Night, night, night. He looked at the witch and knew that she was turning mad. He looked at Alishia, twitching in her sleep and mumbling words he did not understand. And he looked at the sky, realizing for the first time ever how even he, a cave dweller, was influenced by the turns of the sun.

“SOMETHING UP AHEAD,”
Hope said. “Something strange.”

“How do you know?”

“Can’t you feel it? The air’s different. There’s a constant breeze from the north, but it feels as though the ground’s moving instead of the air.” Hope looked ahead, toward the shadowy mountains of Kang Kang, and her tattoos squirmed like salted snakes.

Trey lowered Alishia to the ground, groaning as the tension in his shoulders gave way to pain. He kneaded at his cramping muscles and followed Hope’s gaze. The landscape ahead of them was a blank: no contours in the shadows, no hint of any features, no indication that there was anything there at all. Darkness lay thick across the ground. He sniffed for fledge, but found only a sterile odor, like the air in a cave after a flood. Cleaned. Purged. Empty.

“What is it?” he said.

“I don’t know.” The witch hefted his disc-sword and he reached for it. He closed his hand around the shaft and Hope looked at him, eyebrows raised. Then she smiled and let go. “Very well, fledger,” she said. She dipped her hand into a pocket and kept it there.

What does she have in there?
Trey thought. He’d seen her ripping some plant and dropping it into her pocket. To feed something? Or to let the leaves dry?

Alishia rolled onto her back and her eyes snapped open, but when he knelt beside her Trey could see that she was still asleep. He waved a hand in front of her face, but her eyes did not flicker. He so wanted those eyes to turn to him and smile. But he had begun to fear that would never happen again.

“We should go on,” Hope said. “We’ll be in the foothills of Kang Kang before we know it. They’re closer.”

Trey had noticed that too. Though the repulsion he felt was still strong, the mountains had suddenly seemed to come close, pushing him away yet urging him in. He felt as though two forces were acting upon him, and he had no idea which one to obey. He stood and held his disc-sword in both hands, ready to spin the blade and take on anything that came at them from the dark.

“Hope,” he said, “we haven’t seen anyone. We’ve been walking for maybe two topside days, and we haven’t seen another living soul.”

“They’re out there,” the witch said. “Back in the small range of lead-rock hills we passed through, there was a band of rovers. They hid from us. Farther on—maybe half a day ago—we passed close to a village. They were lined against us, barricaded, ready to fight. I could smell the fear on them, and the stink of sheebok and land hogs rotting into the ground. They were farmers. Terrified. Scared of what we were and what we’d do if we found them. If only they knew our fear as well. There have been others too, hiding in shadows or lying low in the folds of the land. We’ve been keeping to the high places so we can see into the distance, looking for Kang Kang and keeping watch for threats. Most of the people around here are lying as low as they can.”

“I heard nothing,” Trey said. “I saw no one.”

“Neither did I. I smelled them.”

Trey thought of all the time he had spent trying to find the hint of fledge on the air.

“So what’s this?” he said quietly. “It’s like an open space of nothing. I see Kang Kang in the distance, but nothing in between.”

“Maybe there
is
nothing,” Hope said.

“What do you mean?”

“The land’s been strange for so long now. Perhaps the Mages’ return has quickened the rot.”

“But there must be time,” Trey said. “We have to have time. This can’t be hopeless, can it?”

Hope shrugged and looked at the sleeping girl. “I don’t think Fate owes us anything,” she said. “We may make it to within five steps of our destination and then be killed in a rockfall. There’s nothing looking out for us, fledger. With Rafe, perhaps his magic watched over us, but not with this one. We’re more on our own than we’ve ever been. Can’t you feel that?”

Trey shivered, nodded, and his guts knotted with a sudden craving for fledge.

“We’ll go on,” Hope said. “We can’t stop here, not now. If you can carry her farther, we should go.”

Hope helped Trey lift Alishia onto his back, then she took his disc-sword and walked on ahead once more, marking their route, looking left and right, up and down, watching for danger or searching for something more. Alishia was heavy, but not as heavy as she had been. Her thighs were thinner, her face less well defined, and her stomach had become soft with adolescent fat.
Still growing younger,
Trey thought.
She’s our limit. We go this way because of what she said, but we only have so long, because of her. If we get there too late…

He heard a thud and felt the ground shake. Hope paused and glanced around at him, then kept moving on. Trey followed. Another crash from somewhere in the near distance, like a giant footfall hitting the land, and again he felt the vibration through his feet.

“What is that?” he said.

Hope had paused again and was looking up at the sky. Trey followed her gaze and saw the shadows. At first he thought it was a huge storm cloud, and he would have welcomed a downpour of rain. It would be a novelty for him, and they were growing painfully short on water. But then he saw the shadows dropping out of the darkness—a mass that seemed to shun moonlight, swallowing it rather than reflecting—and he knew that this was not a rain of water.

The shadows spun groundward. They passed out of view, and seconds later came another series of thuds.

“Hope?” Trey called.

“This should be interesting,” she said.

“Hope, what is it?” But the witch had moved on again, running down through a narrow gulley and heading for a small hill that obscured the land ahead of them. Trey took a final look up, saw more shadows falling away from the mass of negative sky and followed.

“HERE,” HOPE SAID.
“This is where we stop for now.”

Trey struggled up the small rise toward the witch. She was staring south. “What is it?”

“See for yourself.”

He saw the vague, massive cloud above the hillside; then Kang Kang, its highest peaks appearing above the line of the hill. And then as he drew closer to Hope he could make out the landscape that lay between them and the first of Kang Kang’s foothills.

There was very little left.

“What in the Black…?”

“The land has gone bad,” Hope said, as if that could explain it all.

In the distance, the land had been stripped bare. Trees, grasses and plants, all gone. Above them, a mile or two up, the stew of the land twisted and rolled endlessly overhead. Closer by, at the foot of the hillside they now stood upon, the closest extreme of the fallout area was marked by a giant wellburr tree lying on its side, roots exposed and branches snapped and crushed.

“Mage shit,” Trey said. “The land’s eating itself.”

Hope seemed lost for words.

The process must have started quite recently, because it was not yet complete. In several places the bared bedrock spewed broken columns of earth and stone skyward. Geysers of sand and gravel blasted up toward that cloud of land.

At the edges of the cloud, where the effect seemed to lessen, what went up was starting to come back down. The thuds they had heard and felt were trees and rocks falling back to Noreela, slanting away from the stripped landscape and forming a perimeter banking of refuse: timber and stone, soil and vegetation, thumping back down with murderous finality.

Trey saw a sheebok spinning end over end as it fell in the distance. Perhaps it was already dead, perhaps not, but it struck the ground and exploded, sending glistening tendrils of itself across a slew of bushes and trees.

“We need to move back,” Trey said, awed and aghast.

“We’ll be safe here.”

“How do you know? It may spread. It might expand faster than we can run, and then we’ll be sucked up into
that
!”

“Not sucked,” the witch said. “Fall. Everything’s falling upward. It’s stripping the land to the bedrock. Taking it back down to the bare Noreela…taking all the hindrances away.”

“What are you on about?” Trey glanced at Alishia’s head resting on his shoulder, trying to see whether her eyes were open. He lifted his shoulder slightly, trying to gain her attention, but she was still asleep. “Alishia,” he whispered, but there was no reaction.

“We should stay here,” the witch said. “Keep one eye on what’s happening, wait for it to fade away.”

“Maybe it won’t,” Trey said. “Maybe it’ll keep happening until the rock and the ground are all sucked up. Who knows what it may uncover?” He thought of deep mines and the waking Nax and legends of Sleeping Gods, and he looked down at the heathers between his feet, wondering what mysteries their roots tapped in to.

“If it spreads, there’s little we can do,” Hope said. “We can only hope that it stops eventually, otherwise…”

“Otherwise we won’t even get close to Kang Kang.”

“We could go around it,” she said.

Trey looked east and west along the low ridge they stood upon, but both directions vanished into darkness. The cloud above them was huge, and he could discern no limits to the effect ahead of them. Perhaps it went on forever.

“We can’t just sit and wait,” he said. “Alishia is growing younger every minute.”

“Well, we can’t walk out into that!” Hope said, shaking her hand at the strange sight before them.

“You think this is the Mages, like the day growing dark?”

“For what it’s worth, I think not, no. This is the land turned bad as we’ve seen before. The Mages will be busy in the north, destroying whatever defenses the Duke can muster.” She spat at her feet. “That won’t take long. So there’s another deadline for you, fledger. Because the Mages won’t be busy forever, and sooner or later they or their spies will find out about Alishia and what she carries.”