Dawn (48 page)

O’Gan gripped his sword tightly, eyes closed as he tried to judge distance.
If their machines are small, then they’re almost upon us. If they are large, then perhaps they are still a mile away.
He had no way of knowing. The flying machines had surprised them all, and now he feared they would be equally surprised by what came across the land.

“Flyers!” someone shouted in the distance. O’Gan glanced up and saw the illuminated bellies of several more flying things, spartlets darting in, fire glinting from metal, bluish explosions ripping spartlets apart, the huge shapes ducking and weaving and fighting their way groundward.

The roar grew louder still, and O’Gan laid his hand flat against the ground. Small stones spiked at his palm as they vibrated from the massive impacts. He closed his eyes. “They’re close,” he said.

“They’re here!” someone shouted.

O’Gan looked. Just beyond the influence of the firelight, the whole darkened horizon began to shift. More lightning sparkled from shadow to shadow, leaving bluish impressions on his eyes. Metal glinted, stone glowed pale and the Krote army rode in.

Several Shantasi charged the advancing army, firing arrows and flinging stars, whirling slideshocks around their heads and screaming defiance at the dark.

Suicide,
O’Gan thought. He looked to the woman at his left. She smiled and stood, and he knew that he would follow.

Chapter 18

THE SHADES OF
the Land will guide us in,
Alishia thought, and at last she was beginning to understand. With understanding came a new level of hope.
But there’s so much more to this.
She lay there in the darkness, smelling Noreela burning above her. Sometimes she heard thunder as the Mage crashed through book stacks searching for her, and now and then the ground vibrated beneath her as it came close and went away again.

When smoke and fire started to invade the cave, she knew she had to leave. That made her sad. It felt safe down here, enclosed within the foundations of the land. Perhaps she had been lost for a while. But now the fire and heat of destruction were reaching her again, and she thought about how the flames had affected her in the woodland clearing.

The climb was daunting, but as she began she realized that she had little weight to lift. She found handholds in the stone wall, pushed herself up with her feet, and after a while spent breathing in smoke, her fingers closed around a splintered floorboard. Burning pages floated down around her. One landed on her head, but her hair did not catch on fire and she did not feel the heat.

The Shades of the Land will guide us in,
she thought,
but they will each need a sacrifice. Half-Life, Birth, Death…
Finding her feet again, she leaned against a wall of books and listened for the thing hunting her. There was a rumble from her left, but she did not think that was caused by the Mage’s shade. Perhaps it was becoming more sly, fooling her with silence rather than seeking her through violence.

But she had felt its rage and its fear. She knew that it would not be able to remain silent for long.

ALISHIA DWELLED ON
what the land had told her, and she wondered how any of this could ever come together. It had opened itself and allowed her to see so much, but in doing so it had displayed weaknesses that she had no wish to comprehend.
A sacrifice,
she thought, wondering what each Shade of the Land would consider a just payment to guide her inside the Womb, and why. And really, she knew, it was out of her hands. She was the delivery to be made. Whoever delivered her had far more on their shoulders than they could ever believe possible.

In the library, smelling past times being scorched from memory, she ran.

Thunder erupted behind her as a tower of books tumbled and she was almost buried, pages fluttering at her face and covers scoring her flesh. She sprawled to the ground and felt splinters enter her hands. The books pressed her down. One fell open before her and she read a few lines, but she did not wish to know.

Alishia clawed her way out from beneath the book pile, hearing and smelling some of the books erupting into flames behind her. She did not turn to see. The thing was closing on her, pushing its way through from the neighboring corridor where it had been hiding. It shattered the shelving, threw books before it, breathed on them and set them on fire. She did not look, could not afford to see. She was just a little girl. If she froze in fear then that would be the end.

Not just for me,
she thought.
Not only the end for me.

Another book fell before her, its pages blank and ready to be filled. And when this one burst into flames, she realized that even the future was quickly being eaten away.

With the land’s knowledge now brewing inside her, she had become much more than a librarian of the past. She had become the author of the future.

“I’m just a little girl,” she said, her vision blurring. She fell again and rolled onto her back, and she saw the thing closing down upon her, the great, consuming shadow that solidity denied and reality veered away from. The shade of a Mage, fearsome and furious. “I’m just a little girl!” Her tears cleared then, steamed away by fire, and something beat her across the face.

At first she thought it was gushes of flame, and she supposed she would burn here just like every other memory. Her head thrashed from left to right and her skin hurt, but her eyes still saw, unmelted in their sockets. The shade drew closer, a void in everything she could see and conceive. And even as she faded away and woke into the real world, she felt no triumph. She had escaped with knowledge intact. But she knew that the Mages’ ability to find her, and their determination to do so, would be stronger than ever before.

“WAKE!” HOPE SCREAMED.
“Wake, wake, wake!” Each word was punctuated by a slap to Alishia’s face.

The girl could barely feel the impacts. She wondered why that was: the witch looked madder than ever, and she was not pulling her punches. Alishia tasted blood in her mouth, and another adult tooth fell out to leave a milk tooth in its place.

“I’m here,” Alishia whispered.

The witch was panting, whining, looking around her more than at Alishia. Her hair seemed to be falling out in clumps, and her tattoos were twisted together into two violent ropes, buried into the corners of her mouth and continuing down inside. Hope looked as though she was dying, but she was as strong as ever before.

“Something’s coming!” the witch said, bending and grasping Alishia’s loose dress collar. “They passed us once before…if I didn’t dream it. And now they’re looking again!”

Alishia touched Hope’s wrist, encouraging her to let go. The witch started, held her breath, stood and stepped back.

“Everything’s looking for us,” Alishia said. “Please help me.”

“Where do you go?” Hope asked, grabbing Alishia’s hands and hauling her upright.

Alishia swayed on her feet, clenching her bare toes in the snow. Balance was not an easy thing to find. “Away,” she said. “To the beating heart of the land. But I don’t think I can be a visitor there again. Next time, if there is a next time, I think I may be trapped there for good.”

“You’re talking in riddles!” Hope seemed ready to strike out again, but Alishia glanced at her and the witch shuffled away from her.
What does she see in my eyes?
Alishia wondered.

“Life
is
a riddle,” Alishia said. She looked around at the snow-covered hillside, mountains rising before them, the sharp rocks that seemed to recede ahead of them to form a path through chaos. She smiled at Hope, not upset when the witch did not smile back. “We need to go.”

Hope’s face crumpled. She sank to her knees, shoulders shuddering with dry tears, hands clawing at her thighs through her rough dress. No sound left her mouth, but wind whistled between nearby rocks, giving voice to her wretchedness. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know where we’re going, or how to get there. I just don’t know…”

“I know,” Alishia said. She stepped past Hope and walked uphill a dozen steps. To her left a field of razor-sharp rocks scraped at the air, accompanied by an almost subaudible groan that crawled into Alishia’s feet and set her flesh crawling. To her right, shadows danced where they should not, turning the falling snow black. Ahead of them, the way looked safe.

“So now
you’re
leading
me
?” Hope said.

Alishia frowned as the ambiguity of Hope’s purpose flashed across her mind. But she turned to the witch and nodded. “I still need your help, Hope,” she said.
Birth Shade, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade, which can she be?
she thought. The witch stood and came to her, loyal yet deceitful, determined but driven by her own madness and need to be the magician she had always wanted to be.

Alishia walked on, troubled and overwhelmed by her new knowledge. She hoped that when the time came for revelation—for sacrifice—whatever she carried inside would offer a guiding hand.

TREY FELT A
change in the Nax carrying him south. They had passed through fledge seams and caverns, plunged into underground rivers and melted through a lake of ancient ice, emerging unscathed on the other side. All the while the Nax had been there at the edges of his mind, awful and playful, taunting and superior. And then they became silent and serious, and he realized that they were carrying him toward something even more inconceivable.

Where are we going?
he thought, hoping that they would answer.
Can I take myself? Will you let me go when we arrive?
He knew that they heard his thoughts—they were in his mind, cool and sharp—but there was no response. They had not spoken to him for what could have been hours, or years.

The fledge around him changed. It was a graded change, but he felt it straightaway. He had become used to being flooded with the drug, abrading his skin on the outside and soothing his muscles and mind inside. But this new fledge was sharp and cruel, pricking at his skin like a thousand sword points and forcing into his mouth as the Nax dragged him through, filling his stomach. He coughed through the drug and could not breathe, but he had not been breathing for some time now. How could he? He was buried underground.

What is this?
he thought. Images started to play across his mind. They were too rapid to catch. These visions were not his own, and he could not understand their source: he was not casting his mind because the Nax would not let him. No single image stood out, because of their speed—it was as if they played on the insides of his eyelids as he blinked—but they presented a picture of things unknown, and terrible.

Kang Kang,
a voice said, and the Nax had spoken to him again.

Kang Kang! Perhaps Hope and Alishia are here even now? Maybe they’re waiting for me…though what can I do for them?

Trey did not dwell on what he might have become. The Nax dragged him through the fledge foundations of the world, and he did not breathe, yet he could think and reason like the old Trey.
I am Trey,
he thought.
I can’t be anything else.

The fledge in Kang Kang was different. It flooded into and through him and gave him those countless images from the minds of others. The Nax disliked it, but he did not understand how he could perceive their discomfort. They were not talking in his mind, nor were their nebulous bodies actually touching his. Perhaps their uneasiness was his also.

What have I become?
Trey thought once again, and they moved him on.

Sometime later, feeling the weight of the world above him lessening and the kiss of cold air against his fledge-scoured skin, Trey heard the voice of the Nax in his mind one last time.

You are there.