Dawn (57 page)

When the tumbler went from light to darkness once more, Jossua felt himself plucked away by something more bewildering than anything he had ever encountered. In that thing he found a shadow of acceptance, and a respect for his obsession. Its strange voices chanted him somewhere wholly new.

Chapter 22

WE’RE THERE, FLAGE SAID.
Now you can open your eyes.

I’m not sure I’m able,
Alishia said.
Everything’s spinning. Everything’s changing.

It’s due to change some more. We’ve been let inside, and I think you need to see.

Alishia opened her eyes to darkness. She could feel herself being transported in uncertain steps down toward a warmth, and a light. She could sense this light but not yet see it. She tried to lift her hand to rub her eyes, but could not move. Her whole body pained her, and she felt things stabbing into her leg, her shoulder, her hip. These things flexed with every movement, and she bit her lip to prevent herself from crying out.

Can you see?
the amazed voice of Flage said.
Can you see the light?

“Yes,” Alishia replied, and her voice echoed.

Good,
Flage said, and he faded away.

Alishia now could see the stone ceiling of the cave passing by above her. The light increased with each jarring movement, and soon she could make out cracks in the rock, spiderwebs, pale green moss spotting here and there.
Where’s that light coming from?
she thought.
And why is it so warm?
She sniffed for a fire, but the only smell was one of old dampness.

She felt the roughness of the tumbler beneath her. It stopped and rolled gently to the side, and as her feet touched the ground the sharp things invading her body withdrew quickly. She cried out and fell on all fours, hair framing her face and hiding the surroundings from view. For a while she was glad. She stared at the stone floor and saw ancient human footprints, a thousand or a million years old, marking a route in the dust that led up and out.

Where am I?

No one and nothing answered. The sleeves of her dress swamped her hands and she felt cold and exposed in the huge garment. She looked down at herself and saw how small she had become.

What am I to do?

Still no answer. She looked up at the great tumbler that had brought her here, and crushed into its side were the remains of a Red Monk. Its hood was wrapped around the shattered remnants of the skull. All flesh had long since been scoured away, and her shock was only slight.

She sat back and turned her head, ready to take in everything else.
The Womb of the Land!

Here was potential. Here was a library of blank books yet to be written. Here was the future awaiting discovery, and in her there was the future’s seed ready to plant.

Alishia blinked slowly, trying to digest what she was seeing.

The cave was quite large, and perfectly spherical. She sat in an opening at its edge, and the walls rose around her in a flawless curve. It was warm, though there was no sign of fire. The air was damp, the walls slick with moisture, and as she moved her hand across the ground she felt the warmth of it.

“I’m Alishia,” she said. Her voice came back to her, one name echoing into a confusion of noise that could have contained every word ever spoken. She said something else, something personal to her, and the resultant sound was the same. Whatever idea she gave birth to in here held the potential to grow into anything.

She stood slowly, uncertainly, and she was amazed at how light she was. How old could she be? Eight? Six? Younger? She put her hands to her face, pleased at the familiarity of the touch. “I’m still myself,” she muttered, and the echoes said she could have been anyone.

Alishia stepped from the tunnel entrance onto the slope of the sphere. Moving down toward the lowest point of the cave, she glanced back, surprised to see that the tumbler had withdrawn. She had not heard it leave.
There’s so much more to them,
she thought, but that idea probably applied to much of Noreela. “So much more to everything,” Alishia said, and this time her words carried no echo, their meaning clear.

As she walked slowly down the slope she felt herself changing, regressing faster than ever. The dress slipped from her shoulders and she left it behind, though she was not cold. This place was welcoming and safe. It was a place of comfort.

Something appeared back at the entrance tunnel, a dark shape that drove back the strange light emanating from the walls. “Soon,” Alishia said, and the Birth Shade withdrew. It was ready for its offering, and she was ready to make it.

At the lowest point of the cave there were hollows in the ground. They were shapes she recognized. Some had been used, their glossy texture turned rough, veined trace works in their sides gone to dust.
I wonder which one was Rafe’s,
she thought. Others were fresh and clean, dips in the land filled with promise.

She chose one of these, sat close by and brushed her fingers through her hair. It came out in clumps. She tried to stand again but her legs would not hold her, so she crawled those last few steps and settled herself into the hollow.

She was not surprised to find that it fit her perfectly.

THE LIBRARY THIS
time was whole and undamaged, but it was also characterless, and every book spine was blank. There was a reading area, and all the furniture was new and untouched. The leather chairs were fresh and unworn, the unmarked table carved from wellburr wood. No books sat on the table waiting to be read.

There was nothing with Alishia in the library: no rampaging shade, no man, no fire eating away at every moment in history. There was only her. She had the very real sense that she was waiting here for something to happen. And while she was waiting, she might as well read.

She left the reading area and entered the towers of books. She was only a baby, yet her mind was full, and in this dream her child’s legs would carry her anywhere.

She walked for some time before gathering the courage to take down a book. She climbed a shelf to reach it; the spines were all the same, the blank books uniform, but she knew that this particular tome was the one she needed.

Hugging the book against her chest she walked back to the reading area. Here and there shadows were appearing on book spines. They were not yet whole words, but their potential was deafening.

She hauled herself up into the reading chair. It was far too large for her, but still she managed to lay the book on her stubby legs, open the cover and stare at the first blank page.

Alishia closed her eyes and something left her forever.

When she looked again, the page was no longer blank. She began to read of a new moment in time.

The land begins to heal…

THEY WOULD BE
on her and she would be dead.

Hope kept her eyes closed, hands by her sides, suddenly willing to accept death with dignity. She would not fight. It had been a long time in coming, and in her final moments she had helped.

If I look, I’ll see that thing coming at me. Angry. Enraged. Ready to exact weak revenge by spilling this false witch’s blood.

She heard a roar, the sound of something hard striking something soft, and in the screams from the Mages she made out the dregs of words. They formed little sense. The Mages were mad, but unlike her their madness was deep and irredeemable.

At last, Hope could keep her eyes closed no longer, and when she looked, the Mages were battering at the entrance to the Womb of the Land. The Shades had returned, three of them this time, growing from the cave mouth like giant trees. They seemed to shrug off the abuse of the Mage’s magical weaponry. They absorbed fireballs, deflected shock waves from the male Mage, opened shadowy arms to collect hatred and fury and closed them again, swallowing everything meant to do them harm. Each Shade was huge and unchanging now, as though they had recently been fed. And Hope could not help but pick up on the optimism being exuded from these shadows of nothing.

Nothing can touch them,
she thought.
The Mages, with all their dark magic and three centuries of hate, they can’t
touch
them
!

The male Mage turned and stared directly at Hope. His eyes were blazing red coals, narrowed to slits. His mouth opened and displayed long teeth, made longer because his gums had been burned away. He growled, and it rumbled from the earth and into Hope’s bones like an earthquake.

She closed her eyes again.
And now he’ll turn on me.
Something warm touched her face and scalp, and for a second she thought that he was at her, hot breath caressing her as he decided how best to kill. But then she realized that the heat felt good, and familiar, and the one word echoing in her mind as she opened her eyes again was
Alishia
!

KOSAR PARRIED THE
Krote’s first sword swipe, ducked below the second, and then the land began to bleed.

“Alishia!” Kosar shouted. He looked to the east, and the foothills of Kang Kang were silhouetted against an orange and red sky, their slopes and peaks cut in stark relief against the lightening sky, and the glow was spreading up and out like a growing bruise, seeping through the Mages’ dusk from the ground up. Smudged lines of sunlight stretched across the landscape, reached at the sky, probed behind the mountains.

And then, like a giant birthed anew from the fading land, the curved head of the sun started to rise.

Cheers rose across the hillside, and the noise of battle lessened as warriors—Shantasi and Krote alike—paused to take in the incredible sight.

Kosar glanced at the female Krote. She was watching as well, and the amazement on her face slowly melted into what could only be relief. The fresh sun stroked across her scarred scalp and bloodied shoulder, and her few remaining teeth glittered as she smiled.

Kosar looked to the east again. He felt the fledgling heat of the sun on his skin, and it was like dipping into a warm bath. Wisps of fine cloud scratched the sky red. It was the most beautiful thing Kosar had ever seen.

“You’ve lost,” he said. “Your filthy Mages are dead, and you’ve fucking
lost
!”

“So magic me away,” the Krote said. But Kosar could see the strange look in her eyes—part confusion, part relief—and when he raised his sword again she merely glanced at it before turning away.

A hundred mimic soldiers melted back into the ground. The surface flowed northward, down the slopes of the battlefield and out onto the long plains that led toward whatever was left of Noreela. Kosar mourned their passing, but he realized that their purpose was fulfilled. What happened to the few hundred remaining Shantasi, and their Krote enemies, was of no concern to the mimics.

“Going home?” Kosar shouted after his enemy. “Fleeing again?”

The Krote turned and stared at him, and Kosar began to regret his words. “I have more things left to do,” she said. She gazed around the field of battle, the piles of bodies, the shambling dead and weary living, the Krotes and machines, the Shantasi cheering here, regrouping there, all of it now lit by the sun rising triumphant. “Do what you will. My time is moving on.” She mounted her machine and sent it a command.