Dawn (56 page)

At last they emerged onto grassland not crawling with mimics, and here they found the true battle still under way. Kosar glanced back, wondering at the extent of the mimic help, and it was like looking at reality unbecoming: machines were melting, their Krote riders already coming apart, and blue fire disappeared in a flash. The whole landscape was blurred and uncertain.

“I don’t see how this can go on,” Lucien said.

“What do you mean? Noreela is helping us! The serpenthals, and the tumblers, and now the mimics. What do you mean?”

“Look,” Lucien said. He pointed across the hillside with his bloodied sword.

The ground was covered with the dead and dying. Machines stalked here and there, dishing out more death and, occasionally, finding it themselves. Several machines stood dead in a circle, the result of some unknown attack, but their Krote riders had escaped their fate and were now fighting the Shantasi on foot. The clang of swords, the spark of metal meeting metal, drifted across the hill. And from one extreme of the battlefield to the other, the dead were rising again.

“Mimics,” Kosar said, but he knew immediately that he was wrong. These were the dead readying to bear arms against their Shantasi kin. Among them, oozing like a slippery memory, a stain on the hillside.

“That’s a shade,” Lucien said. “The Mages have given it something, and for every Shantasi killed we have a new enemy.”

“That’s unreal,” Kosar said. “That’s
unfair
!”

Lucien laughed. It was a strange sound, so unexpected and unusual on this field of death and undeath. The Monk actually bent over and held his stomach, his burnt back exposed to the air and glistening in the moonlight where the cauterized flesh had started breaking down. “We’re all going to die,” he said. “And you…think
that’s
unfair?”

Kosar was angry at first, but then he smiled.

Neither of them heard the machine rush them from out of a haze of smoke. It stomped Lucien to the ground, pressed down on his throat with one heavy stone leg, and on its back the fearsome Krote stood and smiled. “Glad to see you think war is so amusing,” she said. “You could almost be one of us.” She touched the machine’s back and it balanced all its weight on one leg, crushing Lucien’s chest and neck, parting his head from his body, squeezing out his final breath in a haze of blood and spit.

THAT FELT GOOD,
Lenora thought.
Red Monk fighting with the Shantasi!
she sent to her machine, and it ground its foot some more, turning its stone heel until it met mud wetted with blood.

“You’re no Shantasi,” Lenora said, looking at the man cowering before her. She frowned. Something about his features, his hair, the smell of him…“I know you,” she said.

“Last time I saw you, I made you fall,” the man said. “I’m Kosar. And you’ve just killed another friend of mine.”

“You were friends with a Monk?”

Kosar glanced down at the mess beneath the machine’s legs, up again at Lenora. “He was against you. That makes him my friend.”

Lenora slid from the machine’s back and landed astride the Monk’s remains. She drew a sword and thrust it down into his chest—these Monks were tenacious, and she wanted to take no chances—and then stood and faced the defiant man. She felt those eyes behind her, watching. “Do you recognize my machine? See any familiar features?”

Kosar did not glance away from her face. “It’s a monster,” he said. “As are you.”

Lenora shrugged, and she bled. She had gathered several more wounds to wear alongside those from so long ago, and even her old scars were aching again, singing with the memory of their creation. “You were traveling with monsters,” she said. “That witch, with betrayal in her eyes. That boy, carrying something awful. That girl…” She frowned, but tried not to show her doubt.

“Rafe had magic. It would have been
good
for the land.” Kosar spat on his sword. “And why the
fuck
am I even talking with you?” He darted at her, sword swinging up toward her stomach.

Lenora sidestepped and cracked him on the temple with her sword handle. He groaned and fell, fingers splayed in the bloody muck around the dead Monk.

Kosar stood and turned on her, and in his eyes Lenora saw pride, and determination, and a confidence that belied his situation. She had seen the tumblers and fought one off. She had ridden through the gray haze rising from the ground, and it came apart before her machine. The swirling sand demons were still fighting the Krote’s rear guard back on the plain, and ahead of them lay Kang Kang and the girl with her brains crushed into the dirt. But for a moment, this man unsettled her more than anything she had yet seen of Noreela. For a moment, he made her feel mortal.

“What surprises do you have left?” Lenora said.
Come with me,
the voice of her daughter whispered, and Lenora closed her eyes for an instant, trying to put the voice back down.

Kosar laughed. He saw that she had a weakness. Lenora tried to grin, but a pang of pain in her womb turned it into a grimace.

“Are you hurting?” he asked.

Lenora had been asked that recently, by Ducianne. And as she went at Kosar she realized that, yes, she was hurting. Soon, perhaps, she would find out why.

HOPE COULD NOT
move. To her left, Alishia had disappeared in the grasp of the tumbler, rolling downhill and into the smoke that was drifting across the valley from the ruined machine. The female Mage, reclothed in flesh and rage, had gone in pursuit of the tumblers. Her screams still echoed around the valley. Before Hope, the male Mage was fighting the Nax. And Hope was trapped between them all, apart from the action, unable to do anything but watch.

Though grotesquely burnt, the Mage still possessed enormous strength. The Nax circled him like wisps of red smoke, gushing fiery breaths, lashing out with bladed appendages and spiked wings, bounding from the ground and trying to confuse him with their rapid twists and turns. But the Mage fended off every attack, his own limbs moving faster than Hope could see. The fight was vicious and brutal, every move a death strike, every counter a desperate defense.

Hope felt useless. In this clash of monsters she was nothing, a human smear on a battlefield the likes of which Noreela had never seen before. The Cataclysmic War had been humans against the Mages and their Krotes. No tumblers, no Nax. Just the humans, as though the land had been content to leave them to clear up their own mess.

Something had changed this time, and Hope was glad.

She looked around the valley, trying to spot the tumbler that had carried Alishia away. She was desperate to believe that the tumblers had come to help, but it was still a stretch of the imagination that she found difficult to make. This was Kang Kang. Bad things happened here, and perhaps this was fate’s final cruel twist in their wretched story: so close to saving the land, then whipped away by a tumbler and never seen again.

But the Mages
want
her dead,
Hope thought.
So why run after her when she’s in the grip of a tumbler? No escape from them. Never.
She saw hints of movement between drifting smoke across the valley, and she tried to project its path, looking at a clear spread of hillside and waiting for something to arrive.

She saw them; two tumblers, one with a flash of gray cloth that must have been Alishia’s dress, and the Mage running after them faster than was possible, her feet leaving smoking wounds in the hillside.
She must have dealt with another tumbler,
Hope thought.

The Nax emitted a horrendous roar, filling the valley with a voice that killed grass and shriveled leaves. They went at the male Mage again, converging from different angles and driving into him. He flexed his chest as they came, as though filling his lungs for a scream to counter their own. But what came from his mouth, eyes and ears was far more than a scream. Hope saw it the instant before she ducked below the trunk once again, a shock wave of solid air that expanded out from the Mage’s head and drove everything before it.

Hope covered her ears and opened her mouth. The shock wave struck the fallen tree, shattering what little remained, sweeping up a cloud of dead insects and wood fragments and adding them to the wave of debris. She glanced up in time to see a flash of red pass directly above her. Its limbs trailed, and it seeped smoke and fire as it went. It landed fifty steps away and rolled in the disturbed soil, burrowing, disappearing below the surface even as the male Mage’s defiant laughter followed the terrible shock wave he had unleashed.

Hope groaned, but barely heard. Her hands were wet with blood from her ears, and something clicked in her chest as she breathed.
I’ll die here if I don’t move,
she thought, but the only way to move was to stand. The Mage would see her. And old as she was, bitter and mad, she realized that she most definitely did not want to die.

She rolled to her side and peered around the end of the broken log. The Mage was standing to the side of the cave mouth, arms still held wide, head back, mouth open as though sucking in the scent of victory. His body was ruined from the fire, but Hope had never seen anyone appear so strong.

From down the slope Hope heard the female Mage scream again.

The two remaining tumblers rolled uphill into the blazing remains of the flying machine. They jumped and bounced, landing in areas free of fire and machine pieces. The lead tumbler still carried Alishia pinned to its side. Her arms waved, and one leg bent and straightened with each revolution. From this distance she still seemed whole.

The tumblers passed the wreckage, and Hope realized their intention.

They were aiming directly at the cave.

The female Mage appeared from out of the smoke. She screamed and raged, coughing out another burst of blue fire. The tumbler to the rear intercepted the fire before it could strike Alishia, spinning in a circle as the flame melted its way inside. Hope heard distant screams, and she knew they did not come from the Mage.

The final tumbler, Alishia spiked to its side, rolled quickly toward the Womb of the Land.

“S’Hivez!” the female Mage screamed, still running but realizing now that she would not reach Alishia in time.

Hope stood. “Here I am, you piece of shit!”

S’Hivez spun around to look at Hope.

The tumbler flitted behind him, carrying Alishia with it. It entered the darkness of the cave.

Hope closed her eyes.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ KNEW
that the tumbler now carried someone else. Someone
alive.
But he could no more communicate with them than he could with Flage.

He could sense the tremendous sense of potential present there. He could smell the stink of magic, and there was nothing he could do to purge it from this world.

If he were alive, Jossua could have fought. If he were dead, perhaps he would have attacked from the inside, because the wraith of a Red Monk would be as tenacious as the soul of one still alive. But he was neither. This first Red Monk, one who had seen the Mages from Noreela’s shores three centuries before, refused to give up on life and would not accept death.