Dawn (25 page)

But never anything like this. This was a slaughter. And this blood, spilled so easily, smelled of triumph.

Lenora breathed in deeply, and the last scream of a dying woman drifted away across the Cantrass Plains.

Scattered fires illuminated the scene, giving a deeper darkness to the middle distance. Bodies burned, spitting and gushing geysers of bluish flame. The windows of the homestead flickered like blinking eyes. The rear of the old machine seemed to blur and slip, and a great section of it melted away from the rest, the glowing acid flowing thick with dissolved rock, metal and flesh.

Sweet revenge?
a voice said deep inside, ambiguous, and Lenora was strong, she could listen. The future was filled with vengeance, and one would feed the other.

With the shade of her daughter whispering to her, she led the Krote army south across the Cantrass Plains.

LENORA KEPT HER
eight hundred Krotes and their machines with her. They split into four groups, maintaining contact with one another by means of small flying constructs, several dozen of which had split off from some of the larger machines and formed themselves from air, earth and rock. There was a hint of the shade’s workings in these things, but they did more than simply flit through the air like bats. The first time one of them landed before Lenora on the back of her mount she cringed away, waiting for it to sprout arms and legs, a head or some other less obvious appendage. But it remained motionless, a thing the size of her fist with only a grilled opening at one end to mar its smoothness.

And then it spoke.

Since then Lenora and her captains had been in constant communication, though the landscape often meant that they were out of sight. They spoke of the battle to come with both eagerness and concern, but none of them considered anything farther ahead. None of them spoke of a time beyond war.

The ground trembled beneath them. The darkness parted for them, and closed again when they had passed. They slashed across the surface of Noreela, wounding it with their presence, and already there was blood drying on their swords.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ HAD
been walking forever. At first he had tried counting the days and nights, but the constant twilight had disturbed his perception of time to such an extent that seconds became minutes, and the only count he could rely upon was his own rapid heartbeat. It pummeled at his chest, speeding even when he tried to rest, as though keen to carry him ever closer to death.

He kept his hood up, rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, looked at the ground a few paces ahead of him as he walked on.

His moonlit journey across Lake Denyah had been strange. He had heard things he had never noticed out there before: creatures surfacing, hissing at the sky and sinking down again beneath the waves, leaving the spicy stench of something unknown drifting across the lake’s surface. None of the rising things seemed interested in him. One emerged a hundred steps from his small boat, a black shiny shape. He stretched out low in the boat so that he did not offer such a large target—joints complaining, old bones wishing he were still at rest in the Monastery—and watched over the gunwale as the serpent twisted and wailed like a pained wraith in the moonlight. The life moon sheened its oily skin, stroking head to tail as it raised various parts of itself from the water. Then it floated on the surface before sinking slowly beneath, leaving barely a ripple to hint at its existence. Jossua sat up again, staring after the serpent, and he knew why he had never seen its like before.
That was not something of the Mages or the new magic, but it
was
a thing coveting darkness. A creature of the night previously hidden away from the sun, emerging now because of the constant twilight. The
Mages’
twilight.

Perhaps there will be more.

He had continued on across the lake, sailing when the winds were in his favor, paddling slowly when they were not. He was a very old man, and he expected his heart to give out at any moment. But he was resilient. He had seen and been through much more than any other Monk alive, and experience had hardened his shade like petrified wood. His bones might be weak, his skin thin and his blood like water, but it was his single powerful obsession that drove him on. Even in this dusk, when color all but bled from the world, he knew that his face was a bright, angry red.

After Lake Denyah, he had entered into the mountain range of The Heights, a place that harbored many small, isolated settlements. The people who lived here rarely left, and knew little of what was happening elsewhere in Noreela. Jossua had not been here for over a hundred years.

The Heights was where he found the first body.

At first the corpse was simply a shadow amongst shadows, blending into the shaded landscape like any other rock, tree or deserted dwelling. But then the shadow showed its first hint of red.

The settlement he was passing through revealed signs of having been abandoned in a hurry. Front doors were hanging open, the streets were strewn with clothing, and here and there he found rotting animals that had been left tethered to stakes in the ground. He could make out the shape on the foot of the hillside now, distinct from other shadows, a shape he should recognize…

Walking through the village, he looked for clues as to what could have made the people flee. There was no indication that they had been attacked: no arrows in timber walls, dropped swords, bodies cleaved in two. There were no bodies at all, other than those of the trapped animals.

And that one ahead, on the hillside, something gleaming in one hand.

Jossua paused at the edge of the village, trying to gain a sense of what had happened. If there was danger in The Heights, he should know it for himself, because he had a long way yet to travel.
Far too long,
he thought, but he cast that idea aside. He had not been more than a dozen miles from the Monastery for decades, and now here he was embarking on a journey of three or four hundred.

I’ll be like that,
he thought.
That dead thing up there on the hillside. Left to rot into the ground. Purpose unfulfilled. My life ended as uselessly as it began.

He could still recall parts of his first journey across Lake Denyah, the glow of the Mages’ terrible power scorching the horizon, and the hundreds of people around him who would be dead within hours. Three hundred years ago, more lifetimes than he had any right to have lived. Yet here he was still breathing and thinking, and he had always believed there was purpose in that.

He always believed he lived for something more.

As soon as he left the deserted village behind, he knew that he was looking at a Red Monk.

Her hood had been torn away, along with most of her robe. The exposed skin was dark, and made darker by huge rents in her flesh. Dried blood was black in the moonlight. She had lost one arm and most of her other hand, her left leg was shredded like a gutted fish and her face was a mess of broken bone. The remnants of her hand were still curled around the hilt of her sword.

Jossua knelt beside the dead Monk, reached out, touched the back of her neck. He moved her cold head from side to side and lifted her hair. He was trying to see what had killed her.

Some of the wounds were from swords or slideshocks. Others were less easy to identify. The terrible trauma to her foot seemed to have been inflicted by something multibladed, or perhaps by teeth.

“What have you been through?” he said. But she had no answer, so Jossua stood and moved on, leaving the dead Monk to rot into the hillside.

He worked his way through the valleys of The Heights. He had neither the energy nor the inclination to climb mountains and traverse ridges. The valley was shaded from moonlight for much of the way, carved over time by the small rivers and streams that started high up and flowed eventually into Lake Denyah. He took water from the streams, rested by the rivers, and all the while he was amazed by the utter silence of this place.

Last time he was here, the mountains had been alive with noise. He hid himself away up on the mountainside, finding a small hollow in the ground sheltered from above by an overhanging rock and concealed from all sides by a growth of thick yellowberry bushes. From there he watched and listened, content to observe events rather than be a part of them.

Skull ravens had buzzed him, cawing into the sky as they touched on his mind and turned away. People worked on the valley floor, tending crops and hunting, building homes and damming streams to form fishing lakes. Their cattle bayed, wolves howled, children ran and laughed and screamed, and late at night the adults would sit around the village perimeter and light fires, keeping the darkness at bay and talking quietly amongst themselves. There was noise and activity, and Jossua had remained in his hiding place for seven days watching the village go about its business. The mountains were never silent. At night there were animals abroad, and the land itself seemed to breathe. There was still a rhythm to things even then, two hundred years after the Cataclysmic War had plunged the land into decline. The rhythm was upset on occasion, and the land sounded like an old man’s breath on his deathbed…but there was always more than silence. Perhaps it had been the sound of plants growing and dying.

Now the permanent twilight had started killing the plants. The inhabitants of these places had fled, and whatever once lived on the mountains seemed to be still, or dead. Magic’s withdrawal had mortally wounded the land; it seemed that it had taken magic’s reemergence to finally kill it.

A couple of miles farther on, Jossua found two more Monks, both of them dead, both bearing horrendous wounds similar to the first. He barely paused. He had known once the sun failed to rise that the Monks’ cause was at an end, that the Mages had returned to claim magic for themselves. And he had known what this would mean.

But seeing the results of defeat was harder than he could have imagined.

HALF A DAY
later he saw another Red Monk. This one was still crawling.

Jossua paused for a moment, unnerved by this, the only living thing he had seen in over a day. Perhaps deep inside he had decided that he would never see a living Monk again. Days spent making his way across Lake Denyah and through The Heights had engendered a sense of isolation, which finding the Monks’ corpses had only exaggerated. Now something else was moving in this valley floor apart from him.

He knelt, tilting his sword so that it did not drag against rocks. The injured Monk was a hundred steps away, crawling so slowly that movement was barely visible. Jossua had spent long nights watching the moons vie for space in the sky, and he had often tried to discern their movements, wondering what it could mean that he only made it out if he closed his eyes for hours at a time. He had once believed that it displayed his disassociation from nature, an inability to perceive the tides of time which meant that he was remote from the land’s true beat. Events of great consequence shifted with the speed of a waning moon, and Jossua missed it all because he did not have the ability to see.