Dawn (18 page)

She had heard many stories, all of them different, all of them spouted by people who swore that they told the truth. One man, lying naked on her bed while she prepared him a stew of calming herbs, told her he knew someone who had seen a Sleeping God.

A cave in the Widow’s Peaks, and the God was down there, the size of ten men but with a mind so much larger, reaching much farther. It made its own darkness. My friend thought it was asleep. He touched it. He wanted some of its power for himself, thought he could just take it away. It drove him mad. He came out raging and he was never the same man again.

If he came out raging,
Hope had said,
how can you believe anything he said?
The man glared at her, his whore, and she said no more.

Hope was close to where she had seen the shape rise and fall. It had curled out of the ground, like the spine of a sea creature parting the waters in the Bay of Cantrassa. The broken rocks to the left, the lake of darkness to the right…yes, she was almost there.

The size of a mountain,
one book had said,
their eyes lakes in the land, their minds beyond and above what we can know or understand. The Sleeping Gods once walked Noreela and harvested its forests, ate of its fields and meadows, preparing the land for their descendants. We are born of the Sleeping Gods, and like concerned parents they still keep one ear to our collective voice, one eye on our progress.

They would have come back by now if that were true,
Hope thought.
Three hundred years or three days ago, they would have come back.
She slowed, her feet dragging on the bare stone, suddenly terrified of what she would find. She had heard so many legends of the Sleeping Gods, read so many stories. Lay there sweating while sailors from The Spine or Breakers from The Heights fucked her and whispered what they knew. None of them really knew anything, but she let them talk nonetheless, seeking evidence between the lines of their lies. Since the Cataclysmic War the folklore had become more diverse and myth-based than ever before. People read so little nowadays, and as Noreela regressed, so distances between places increased. Noreelans traveled less, and stories had farther to go. Each whisper changed a name or a place. Every telling exaggerated one part of the Sleeping Gods’ myth, and forgot another. They had existed, but beyond that nothing was certain.

They went down because they were shamed by Noreela
…

They await better times…

They will awake upon the breaking of the Black…

Hope had everything to fear and little to gain, yet still she went on. Would a Sleeping God help her? Would it even recognize her as something other than an insect to be crushed beneath its heel?

She thought so. They were little more than myth now, but in many stories lay a common vein of hope. They were the good of the land gone to sleep, the promise of a better future, and their most devout followers believed that their return would cure all wrongs. They were hope personified, and she had always known their name.

She walked on, and fifty steps later, as she came to the rent in the land where she had seen the shape rise and fall, the boiling soup of Noreela swirling high above finally parted. Life and death moons streamed down, and she saw what filled the hole.

Hope fell.

TREY WAS STRUGGLING.
Light though she was, Alishia lay awkwardly across his shoulder, her bony hip grinding into his neck. A couple of hundred steps from their makeshift camp he came to the first obstacle: a mass of undergrowth, tangled and stinking of something dead. He lifted his feet higher, tramped through the fallen plants, left hand held out for balance.

He was beginning to panic.
Hope was leaving him.
Much as he disliked the witch, he could not face this journey without her. She knew so much about the land, what had changed and what might happen next. Much of what she said could well be made up, but her confidence in this knowledge comforted him. Besides, he was a stranger up here.

He looked up and saw the mass of risen ground. It was so unnatural and wrong; it grumbled and groaned like a great creature woken from some ancient slumber.

Alishia mumbled and he almost tripped, stumbling a few steps to regain his balance. He found that he’d been holding his breath. He was doing that a lot lately, because breathing seemed to feed the fledge rage burning inside. His skin felt tight, his throat constricted, his mind pressurized and fit to explode.

He sucked in air and tasted nothing.

Trey could see Hope. She was a tiny shape beyond the barrier of fallen debris, hurrying across the silvered base-rock of Noreela.
Caves down there?
Trey thought.
Fissures in the land? Fledge?
But now he could smell nothing, only a curious neutral scent to the air, as though it were all new.

His mind wandered, drawn away partly by panic but mostly by the fledge rage. Imagination tore him sideways while he forged on ahead, and he saw flashes of red, shades of white and the unmistakable smear of blood spreading across the land.

A dream, not a vision.

Alishia muttered something about books of blood, as if she could see what he imagined.

Just a dream. No fledge, no traveling. Just a dream.

He climbed the trunk of the huge fallen wellburr tree, smelling its exposed roots. Then he tackled the mound of debris, slipping and stumbling, clawing at the ground with his free hand, finally sliding down the other side with Alishia still slung over his shoulder.

His leather shoes slapped onto the bare rock, footfalls heavy with Alishia’s extra weight. Behind him lay the chaos of what had once made up this land, fallen and smashed and broken, and ahead lay virgin ground, and Hope. She seemed to have paused, standing there like a frozen shadow. And then her shadow was illuminated as combined moonlight finally made its way through the debris and dust above.

Trey saw the glint of metal as she unsheathed his disc-sword.

And then Hope the witch fell forward and vanished from the world.

Trey fell to his knees and dropped Alishia to the ground. The fledge rage twisted his insides and churned his heart as his mind sought refuge somewhere deep and dark.

No travel,
he thought,
no fledge.
But with the moons finally revealed again, Trey could do nothing to prevent night from flooding in.

THE WEIGHT OF
what she saw pulled Hope down. The hollow in the rock was filled with something gray, textured, curved. The dip was perhaps thirty steps across, and a few steps below ground level the gray surface began, like a smooth, frozen lake that had lain there forever. It gave off a faint glow. It had been uncovered now, given to the moonlight. Given to
her.

That’s what I saw move,
Hope thought as she tipped forward,
flexing up toward the sky, hauled back down by the power of the Sleeping God within.
As she fell, she was not afraid. Air rushed past her face and smoothed her hair. She kept hold of the disc-sword, though she realized how pathetic and petty it would seem to the God. Whatever this thing may be—a distillation of all the stories told, or something else entirely—a sliver of metal was nothing compared to its magnificence.

As she struck the gray surface, Hope did not even close her eyes.
I’ll be breaking in, entering its sleep. I’ll be
waking
it!

The curved skin was thin, like a spider’s nest left for years in a forgotten corner. Hope went straight through with little more than a rustle, wondering how it had escaped the forces stripping the ground all around. But then, the power of a Sleeping God was unknowable.

She struck something hard, gasped as the wind was knocked from her, and for a few moments she lay there, keeping a tight grip on the shaft of the disc-sword. It connected her to the world she had just left behind. It was real. It had been wetted with Noreelan rain and scorched by Noreelan sun; it had tasted blood and soaked up the fledger’s sweat as he wielded it in battle. It held hints of fledge within its folded metal grain. She could not smell or taste anything, and the feel of the disc-sword was the only thing holding her in the world.

Moonlight touched strange surfaces for the first time in…how long? Hope had no idea. The life moon bled silver across the floor she had landed upon—too soft for rock, too hard for bone—and the death moon gave the air a yellowish tinge. Darkness seemed unwilling to seep away; it held on for a while, melting back like black ice under the weak touch of the moons. She breathed in deeply and smelled old air. It was not musty or stale, but it had been waiting to be breathed for a long time. It was weak in her lungs, and dark spots invaded her vision.

Hope raised herself onto her hands and knees, still clasping the disc-sword. Its blade scraped across the floor, like nails on a pane of smooth glass. She winced and wondered how far that sound would carry.

The witch looked up. She was a few steps below the strange skin she had broken through. The hole was ragged and wide, flaps of the gray surface swinging back and forth where they were still connected to their surroundings.

She was in some sort of tunnel, leading off to the left and right. It vanished into darkness in both directions, but she had the impression that it curved downward as well. The floor had the texture of old leather, and the ceiling above her was jagged with strange stalactites. She reached out and touched the wall beside her. It was damp, soft as soapstone, slick to the touch.

“A nest,” she said. “Somewhere to sleep. Somewhere safe and sound.” The impact of what she was seeing, and where she was, suddenly hit her. She gasped and found it difficult to breathe.
Every lungful I take in, a Sleeping God has breathed out!

She wondered where it was. Was she within touching distance? Was it asleep even now behind these walls, beneath this floor? Everything that had happened since she met Rafe Baburn cowering in a shop doorway seemed so meaningless and irrelevant. The people she had encountered, the miles she had traveled, the Red Monks and the Mages—all of them were so far away that even their memory felt stale and faded. The Sleeping Gods were the paused hearts of Noreela, and she wanted to make them beat again.

They would rise up, spread hope, light the skies and crush the Mages like a puddle of shit beneath a sheebok’s hoof.

“It’s all here!” she said, and there were no echoes from the strange cave walls. Perhaps the Sleeping God was swallowing her words to discover how true she was.
See everything,
she thought. She was not ashamed. Everything she had done in her life—the good, the bad, the terrible—had been to seek out magic, to find the old lifeblood of Noreela in order to bring it back.

For you,
a voice whispered.
You did it all for yourself!
She wanted to kill that voice until she realized it was her own.

Hope stood and moved off along the cave.

Moonlight seemed to stick to her. She carried it on her skin and clothes, and even when she could no longer see the rent in the ceiling, still the surfaces around her reflected silver and yellow. Life and death moons combined, as they always should, and she was pleased that the Sleeping God favored neither.

“Wake up,” she whispered. “We need you now…
I
need you. You can rescue magic. Magic! Hear me?
Rise
up!”

The only sound was the whisper of her dress on the floor. She paused and listened for any sign of the God, a heartbeat, a breath. But the heartbeats would be days apart, and the breaths would be allied to the rhythms of the land.

The rhythms are all fucked right now,
her own voice whispered in her head, and she did her best to ignore it.

The old witch moved farther along the corridor. The light remained at a low level, though there was no evident source. She sniffed, and smelled nothing alive. But nothing dead, either. Only age.

Something brushed at her face and she waved her hand before her. She heard the spiderweb splitting and felt it against her palm, strong and thick. She held her breath and waited for the heavy impact of the creature on her face, but none came. In her pocket she held the sleeping gravemaker spider, ready to use it if the need arose. The web seemed old. It was thick with dust, and rattled with the bones of unknown creatures.