Dawn (28 page)

CLOSE TO DEATH,
perhaps Jossua found life for the first time.

His body lay broken and bleeding beneath the foothills of The Heights, Nax sitting about him like shadows. So many open wounds let in so much fledge that his mind soared, passing through a mile of rock with no effort at all, and when he burst out into the Mages’ dusk he reveled for a while, suddenly free of the decrepit vessel that had kept him chained to Noreela for so long. He was old and wise and mad, but with fledge driving his soul skyward he rediscovered that seed of youth, a naive curiosity that had somehow survived the centuries. For the first time in a hundred years he could remember the face of his fiancée as she cried him away to the Cataclysmic War. She had been so proud being betrothed to a novice pagan priest, and he had shunned her as he left. Perhaps he had been afraid, knowing that he would never return. Or maybe at that moment he had already found his purpose. The cruise down the River San had been like being born again, leaving behind the safety of normality and emerging into this new life of war, battles against the Krotes, everything that had followed. He wondered what had happened to his fiancée. She must have grown old thinking that he was dead. Perhaps she married, had children. And that thing she had placed in his hand, the cool metal of a brooch or other lucky charm…he had opened his hand without looking and let it sink into the water, drowning his past.

Spinning high over The Heights, Jossua tried to imagine where that charm was now. It would be buried in silt after so long, unseen from above, unknown from below. Waiting there for someone to find it again. Perhaps it would take ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, and when it was eventually discovered there would be stories built around it, tales that could never be true because there were a billion different stories in Noreela, and he did not even know the truth about himself.

He sensed something to the east, a flicker in the stillness of the night. He floated that way and drifted lower to the ground, and there he found a dead Monk, his wounds home to insects and other crawling things. The Monk’s wraith hovered over his corpse, mad and moaning and terrified of the mind that approached.

Don’t be scared,
Jossua thought, and the wraith stilled.
I’ve come to chant you down.

He had no idea whether it would work. But he stilled his floating mind and shut himself off from the world, and as he imagined the words of a death chant he sensed the wraith fading to Black.

HE MOVED ON,
traveling farther from his body with every second that passed. He found more Monks, all of them having died on their journey toward the Monastery. Their wounds were terrible, and their tenacity impressed him. He calmed their wraiths and chanted them down. Every few minutes he opened his mind to his own body and felt the agony of gaping wounds, content in the pain because it meant that he was still alive. He had never used fledge, and he spent an occasional panicked moment thinking that he too had become a wraith craving the Black.

The Nax wanted me,
he thought.
They sought me; they
need
me. There is more to my life than this.

He went farther, passing over a gray forest where things screamed and plotted, and he rose higher than ever to avoid their touch. There were many dead Monks down there—he could sense their wraiths wailing, staining on the gray like blood splashes on ash—but he could not bring himself to tend them. He could not save everyone. Whatever mad things inhabited those woods had the Monks for themselves, and Jossua would not think of them again.

He cast backward and felt his body beneath the ground, coughing blood into the fledge seam. The Nax were still there, heartbeats so far apart that they may as well have been dead. Waiting. Guarding him. And every now and then something would reach out and touch his skin, ensuring that his heart still beat and his blood flowed.

Jossua journeyed on, and soon he sensed a concentration of confused wraiths ahead of him, every one of them a Monk. He slowed, rose higher and then smelled something that almost made him turn around and flee the way he had come.

Down there in a large depression in the land, magic had happened, and it had left a residue of itself in the ether.

Jossua moved on, gliding up a slope and emerging above the bowl in the land. And there were the machines, still and dead yet scarred with fresh scrapes and scars. They were clean of vegetation. And there were Monks, hundreds of them lying dead and dismembered across the ground. He went to them, chanting all the while and feeling their wraiths slip gratefully away to the Black.

JOSSUA CHANTED LONG
and hard, and with every Monk that left the world he felt more and more alone.
Am I the only one left?
he thought.
I was the first, many years ago. Am I now the last?
The awfulness of what had happened here pressed in on him, crushing his mind to a small, defensive point that he was terrified would blink out at any moment.

I’m still alive,
he thought, and he felt the Nax touching his body a hundred miles away.

I still have purpose.
They called for him and he left, chanting down the last few wraiths as he fled.

I will not yet admit defeat.

He felt the mockery of the Nax, stroking his rent flesh and reeling in his mind as though they controlled the drug. He prayed to the Black that whatever it was they were holding him for, he would find out soon.

THE NAX TOOK
him out of the ground. He did not know how long he had been down there—it could have been a hundred weak heartbeats, or perhaps it was days. They dragged him as they had on the way down, but this time they cleaned fledge from his wounds as they went. He felt a hot fluid scorching his opened flesh, his face, his hands, and when a few crumbs of fledge fell into his mouth the fluid entered there as well. It was bitter and boiling, and he spat and gagged as more flowed in. He was forced through the vein of fledge without being able to absorb any of it. The Nax wanted him with his mind attached.

My body is almost dead,
he thought.
What good is a body like this to them?

Monk,
the Nax said, and again he could hear the amusement in their voice.

“You need me,” he said. In their silence, he found some measure of victory.

They emerged into the freshness of endless night. Jossua was dragged across the hillside, the Nax hanging on to one of his feet with a slick, warm touch. He looked up at the moons hazing the sky and wished he were up there again.

You’re a lucky Monk,
the Nax said.

Lucky?
Jossua thought, but the Nax said no more.
Lucky?
He should have been dead, but somehow they kept him alive. Flesh and skin had been scoured from his bones, his insides were open to the night and his mind was trapped once again in this ailing, weak, pathetic body. He had seen the Red Monks’ defeat and failure—he had smelled magic and sensed the Mages—and now he was lucky.

Lucky?

But the Nax would not be drawn. They paused by a stream and retreated into shadows, hidden away from the massive sky. They left Jossua out in the open. He could feel the coolness of grass beneath his back, though now it was faded and dry.

Noreela may be dead already,
he thought.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ
—A few heartbeats from death, cold from blood loss, pleading with the Nax to tell him what he was meant to do—heard the thing before he saw it.

It was strange how darkness had silenced the land so much. Even night creatures seemed to find no comfort in this endless dusk. But when the rumbling began in the distance, some animals made themselves known. Something small scrambled over his ankle. He felt its scaly tail scrape across a deep gouge and then it touched his other leg, passing over there as well, fleeing quickly from the approaching sound. Another animal passed close by, and in the distance there were growls and cries as things twittered their fear into the dark. They all fled east to west.

The rumbling grew closer, a series of impacts interspersed with brief moments of silence.

Tumbler,
Jossua thought.

Do well,
the Nax said in his mind, and for the first time ever he heard something other than mockery in their tone.

The tumbler came out of the darkness and rolled Jossua Elmantoz into its hide.

IS THIS THE BLACK?
Jossua thought.
The Black isn’t supposed to hurt.

He could sense wraiths all around. They feared him, and he was not sure why.

Am I dead at last?

Not quite dead,
a voice said.
No use dead.

Who are you?

Flage. I’m of the tumbler that has you, though you are not yet of the tumbler. The mind has chosen me to rise up and speak with you.

I don’t understand.

The voice uttered what could have been a laugh, and it chilled Jossua to the spiritual core.