Dawn (32 page)

HE WAS BATHING
in fledge. He was underground—in a dream or reality, he neither knew nor cared—and around him the drug was crumbling, giving itself to his touch, finding his wounds and soothing them, pricking his tongue with its tangy freshness, setting his blood and his brain afire and readying his mind for any journey he wished to take. It was the freshest fledge he had ever encountered, as though he had found it not only before it was touched or mined, but at the actual moment of its creation. There had been much speculation as to what fledge was and how it came into being: it was grown by the Nax, it
was
the Nax, it was the fallout from Nax dreams. But the simple truth of the drug had often done away with such musings. It was like questioning the existence of air or the origins of water, questions both pointless and faithless. What mattered was that they were there.

Trey welcomed in another mouthful, chewing the perfect grittiness into a paste, swilling it between his teeth and below his tongue and letting it slip down his throat. It set his flesh alight and took away much of the pain. Something else touched his mouth, briefly but definitely. He opened his eyes but there was nothing to see, so he closed his eyes again and welcomed some more of the crumbling fledge inside.

He was moving, slipping through a seam of the drug as though he were a fledge demon, steered between rough stone walls and protruding rocks. The drug parted around him easier than it ever should have, coming apart before him and joining again behind. And it whispered all the time, giving him ideas and images that he would never have imagined himself.

The fledge rage retreated, defeated and petulant. He was happy to feel it go.

I can travel,
he thought, and he set his mind free of his body, moving away and only glancing back once.

He obscured what he saw from his mind. The drug made it easy to do so.

Trey traveled, up out of the ground and into the cool dusky night. He spun and rose in the air, trying to decide which way to go. North would only take him back over the ground he had just traversed, and he had no wish to see that ruined landscape again. South…that would take him closer to Kang Kang, and while that was not a place he wanted to go, he had need to travel there. He must find Hope and Alishia, and make sure that the girl was still alive.

He moved through the air, a mind separate from body yet still inextricably linked. The ground below soon returned to normal, and he passed through the huge banking of uprooted trees, soil, rocks and dead creatures that marked the limit of this strange effect. He sensed little still alive in that pile of detritus: a sheebok here, a snake there, shaken and confused by what had happened and still trapped. They would be dead soon. He emerged from the other side of the mound into open air once more, expecting to find a normal landscape below him: trees and scrub, rocks and gulleys. Streams, perhaps, originating in the foothills of Kang Kang and venting out onto the plains. Even dwellings.

But what he found was anything but normal.

This was the edge of Kang Kang; its first small hills, its border region, pushing against the rest of Noreela like opposing poles on two swing-sticks. Trey paused high in the air, disoriented and confused for the few seconds it took him to level out and calm down.

The ground below looked like the diseased skin of a buried giant. Here and there soil had filled a hollow and given rise to small shrubs, grasses and trees, but most of what he could see was a pale, pitted surface, marred by conical vents gushing steam. The steam flowed southward toward Kang Kang, dispersing into a mist. The light from both moons reflected through the mist, casting shifting shadows on the ground below.

Trey dipped lower, moving into the steam to hover close to one of the vents.

He recoiled as a slew of images struck him, each with a distinct emotional impact. He wanted to cry and laugh, cower with fear and march on unafraid, but the visions were confused, their implications sensed rather than seen or felt. The instant he thought he had an understanding of one image, it flitted away to be replaced by another.

The ground was venting memories that Trey could not understand. He was glad. They tasted of painful histories, and right now it was the future that concerned him most.

The vent resembled a pustule on bad skin, except a thousand times larger, standing as tall as a man and its surface so stretched and tight that it was almost translucent. He wondered whether he would find any memories of the future inside, so he moved back down. But the vent would allow him no access. He moved around it and tried again, probing with his disembodied consciousness, feeling strong from the fledge but still unable to see inside this thing pouring memories from the land.

The flow from the vent’s mouth was fast, tempting and hypnotic, and Trey had to force himself away. If he submitted to its allure, perhaps he would be lost in Kang Kang’s memories until he became one of them.

And then, struggling away from the flue, he saw movement farther up the hillside.

Hope was dragging Alishia after her across the strange ground. The girl was struggling behind the witch, trying hard to keep up. Hope had a tight hold on Alishia’s hand.

Trey closed in quickly, pausing above the witch and listening to her insane babble.

“All gone, all lost, come with me, come on, girl, keep up! We’re nearly there, we’ll find the place and the place will find us, and I’ll be there when you’re there. Forget the past, forget what happened here, don’t
breathe
if that’s what it takes, it’s misdirection. Kang Kang fooling us into thinking it’s still
alive…
Keep up, girl!” She tugged at Alishia’s hand and the librarian began to cry.

Alishia was smaller than ever, her clothes hanging on her as though she were barely there at all. Her eyes were watery, dark rings beneath them, and the skin of her face looked sallow and sweaty.

What’s happening to her?
Trey thought. But he knew without asking, and without going closer, and without dipping into her mind to try to tell her everything was going to be all right.

She’s dying.

Trey moved closer to Alishia and passed inside her, looking for that vibrant young woman he had known for such a short, precious time. But he found something else instead, a place that drove him away like steam from one of the land’s vents: a burning library, books falling, blackened paper floating on the air, words and history of Noreela becoming ash and dust beneath his gaze.

“What’s that?” the witch squealed, thrashing around her head with Trey’s disc-sword.

Trey tumbled from Alishia and rose high into the air, looking only upward because he did not wish to know what down revealed. The dusk persisted, always dusk, and he stopped only when he became afraid that he would never find the ground again.

Trey returned eventually to his own body, finding it deep beneath the ground. And slipping back inside, he realized where he was, and began to wonder why.

THE NAX MADE
hollows in the wide fledge seam and moved Trey ever southward.

The miner was more petrified than he had ever been before. His heart fluttered like a bird trapped within the cage of his chest. The fledge flooded his system and tried to calm him, but he could sense what was moving him. He could feel their shapes and forms, and they were wrong. He could hear their voices, words he could never know, and they were wrong. He could sense their minds around him, inviting him to enter, urging him to view things through their own world, and every touch of their thoughts was very, very wrong. Trey opened his mouth to scream but there was no air to draw into his lungs, only fledge. He inhaled anyway.

Soon, he was drowning.

Chapter 12

ALISHIA HEARD THE
voice of Hope the witch, mad and raving and filled with selfish intent, and everything around them was wrong. She closed her eyes and found sleep again, a place haunted by the stink of burning.

Blue flames danced all around her, and whichever way she turned she saw only smoke, and burning books, and tall book stacks simmering as the histories they contained came under threat as well.

There’s so much here, how can I ever find what I need?
she thought.

What
do
I need to know?

She was worried about Trey, because she had read of his danger in a book that burst into flames. She was worried about Hope because the witch was hauling her ever southward into Kang Kang. And she was worried about herself. She felt that she had been handed some great task, but she could not find her way through it. She was lost here in this burning library, adrift in a place she should know so well.
If I’m to be told something, why do I have to go and find it?

“Whatever I have inside me is much deeper than this place,” she said, and she closed her eyes to see. But she could not. She probed with her mind, trying to discover the route back into that basement. Perhaps she had missed something down there? But she could no longer find the door. She dropped to her knees and scratched at the timber floorboards, using her nails to pry up a few loose splinters, widening a joint, prying and straining and finally snapping up a slat of wood as long as her hand. A burning page fluttered across the floor and slipped between the boards, and Alishia pressed her face to the crack to see where it went.

The page fluttered downward, barely touching the thick darkness below. She watched it for a long time, falling, falling, listening to the library destroying itself around her but never taking her eyes from that single falling sheet. And in the instant before it was snuffed out forever she saw shadows moving around it, closing in and starving the flame as though afraid it would reveal them for what they were.

Alishia sat back on her heels and gasped.
So deep,
she thought.
So filled with
things.

She stood and ran, an aimless sprint that took her into a warren of narrow passages. Around one corner she came across the worst destruction yet. Fire had eaten into the sturdy timber supports of a bank of shelving and much of it had given way, the fractured stumps of wooden columns charred and exposed like the library’s ribs. Several dozen shelves had fallen, and thousands of books had tumbled into chaos. Many of them simmered, some burned and a couple of hundred had been reduced to little more than a ghost of their old selves, ashen shapes that fell apart beneath the weight of Alishia’s gaze.

The librarian started climbing. It should have been treacherous but she seemed to find her footing easily, mounting the hill of books and standing at its summit to see what was on the other side.

In the library, a forest glade. She closed her eyes and frowned, feeling for an instant the movement of Hope carrying her ever southward. When she opened her eyes again she was still in her library, and before her lay the clearing. The trees all around were made of books, stacked up for trunks, twisted for limbs, torn for leaves. Between the trees and the actual clearing reality changed, blurring from ripped pages to rough grass. Here and there a plant showed both; a bush with twigs and leaves, book bindings around its base and genuine roots protruding above the paper-strewn ground.

At the center of the clearing lay a wide, flat stone. It was dusted with snow and the wind—perhaps birthed by the fires—had blown the fine flakes into lines, shapes and pictures etched into its surface.

I don’t know what that says.
But with that thought came the realization that, were Alishia to go down into the clearing, its meaning would become clear.

She began descending the barrier of books, her feet stepping unerringly from one firm foothold to the next. She held her hands out from her sides for balance and thought of Kosar, the thief with the branded fingers, and how he walked like this to prevent his fingertips scraping on his clothing.
I wonder where he is now?
She glanced down at the books beneath her feet—perhaps one of them held his story, or part of it, or whatever the future may have for him—then stumbled and fell forward. She landed on her side in the strange clearing, sitting up quickly and looking back, terrified that she would be somewhere else entirely. But the library stacks still stretched back from this place.

The grass beneath her hands was cold and brittle. There was no daylight here, only the light of the fires, and it seemed to match the strange twilight existing in the real world.
What’s real and what isn’t?
Alishia thought. This
could be the real world. Everything else—Rafe, Hope, Trey, Erv the stable lad and my library that the Red Monk burned down—that could all be my imagination. Pages in my own book. Ideas I never wished to have.
She stood, wiped her hands on her legs and realized that the snow coating the stone slab was actually ash.

She blew the ash from the carvings in its surface.

At first the images and etchings made no sense at all. They seemed to be a random collection of markings: strange letters and obscure symbols, pictures of creatures she did not recognize, numbers written backwards. She blew more ash away, making sure that she had uncovered everything in case the whole picture suddenly came together.

Something grumbled deep in the library and shook the ground; another stack of books tumbling to nothing.
And another thousand people die,
Alishia thought, disturbed by the idea but certain that it was true. High up where book stacks met in the haze of distance, a massive cloud of fire and smoke erupted, jumping from stack to stack and encircling the clearing like a crown of flames.
Fire won’t touch this,
she thought, tracing one of the etchings with a finger. As she followed the smooth carving, something stirred in her mind, a memory stretching its legs and unfurling. She frowned and closed her eyes, continuing to touch the same etching back and forth, and each completed circle made the thought stronger.

It was a memory of something she had never done. It belonged to something else. But it was becoming whole and clear, and she moved on to the next carved shape and began following it with the same finger.

Fire bristled high above her and several burning books struck the ground close by. One of them burst apart into a shower of flaming paper, and it took Alishia a few seconds to register the burn on her arm and the smell of singed hair.

“This fire can’t touch me,” she said, and as if to deny her words another burning page landed in her hair and set it aflame. She waved both hands and batted out the fire. She had scorched a couple of fingers, and her palm already held a blister the size of a tellan coin.

The rock called her back and she went. It was the knowledge she needed, and while the rock itself would always be here—wherever “here” was—she understood that her chance to read it would never come again.

Scared now, breathing harshly and feeling the baggy clothes hanging loose around her body, Alishia began to see what the rock had to say.

IT FELT AS THOUGH
she was reading a book about the whole world of Noreela in the space of a few heartbeats, rather than the many lifetimes it should really take. She felt drowsy and sick with the information input, but ecstatic as well. Ideas floated through her mind, and they were like words in a sentence that had no clear meaning.
Birth Shade needs a seed,
she read, and everything else seemed to echo that thought, that image, building on the idea and giving it a history. She was filled with the joy of new life. Around the clearing were young trees and plants, budding flowers and a few fledgling birds and the fleeting shadows of ghost animals that would one day exist here. The stone slab itself was redolent with the memories of birthings, the antithesis of a sacrificial stone. Alishia could almost smell the fresh blood.

And though the images and name—
Birth Shade
—were there, she still did not fully understand.

I need help,
she thought.
That’s why I’m here, in this place that really isn’t inside my own mind. That’s why I’m exploring what Rafe left me with, because we need
help,
all of us, me and Hope and Kosar and Trey and the rest of Noreela. We need help or we’re lost forever.

She moved on to another shape, waving away drifting ash that burned when it touched her. She looked up at the cone of empty space above this strange clearing, and all around the towering walls of books were exploding into flames.

She traced more etchings, closed her eyes and thought,
Death Shade needs an offering of pain.
When she looked again the plants around her were withered and black, and skeletons of small animals shone in the firelight. Leaves rustled beneath her knees, dead and dry. The slab beneath her fingers was still bloodied, but now it was caked from sacrifice, strong blood that had sent a powerful message.

Alishia frowned, then suddenly cried as though everyone she had known was dead. But she could not move her hand away. To do so now would be like reading the history of the world and stopping three pages before the end.

I don’t have very long.

She wiped her eyes and moved on to the final shapes on the flat stone, excited and scared at what their reading would reveal.
Birth Shade, Death Shade,
she thought,
but what does all that mean? Where’s the seed…and where’s the offering?

She traced her finger through the speckles of ash within the final shape’s smooth cuts, and when she came to the end everything changed again. The clearing around her became a moment in time, the plants alive and yet not shifting, small creatures pecking at the ground or grooming themselves with blood still in their veins, and thoughts frozen in their heads.

Her heart stopped.

Half-Life Shade needs the passion of life and the fearlessness of death.

Alishia fell back from the stone, rolled onto her back and stared up at the towering flames around the clearing. Her heart thumped again in her chest as if to remind her of life. She felt as if she had read a million books in one single sitting, but there was no great epiphany.

I’ve been reading the language of the land,
she thought.
Birth Shade, it tells me, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade. And though Noreela has spoken, it’s making no sense.
She stood and screamed: “It’s making no sense!” And a shower of pages fluttered down around her head.

Alishia beat at the flames in her hair and on her clothes. Paper fell away, words blackening and disappearing before her eyes as though eaten by a shadow. “Shade?” she said. She wanted to save them all, but first she had to save herself. She dashed from the clearing and clawed at the slope of tumbled books, hoping that once back in the library she would be safe from the fire.

But what if this weight of new knowledge had made her more susceptible to damage? What if this place had suddenly ceased to be so welcoming? Perhaps she had been reading things never meant to be read—the language of the land was
for
the land, not mere people living upon it.

Alishia brushed a burning page from her back and rolled down the other side of the pile of books. She fell into a ball of flame, and the blue tongues stroked across her skin and seemed to salve her fresh burns.

She lay there for a while, listening to Noreela being unwritten word by word, instant by instant. What she had read in the clearing was important. But she knew that there was more yet to discover.

ALL OF HOPE’S
talk of Kang Kang, the knowledge she held, the stories she had heard, the myths and legends that haunted squalid taverns and desolate rover camps, the screams of those who had been there dreaming about it still…none of it could have prepared her for being there.