Dawn (7 page)

I led them here,
he thought, and he hated the idea of that. Kosar had always been a loner, not a leader. But Rafe’s damned magic had steered and coerced them down the center of Noreela, dangling free will and then snatching it away at every opportunity. They had been driven here like a horse guided by its rider, except that their rider had been acting through the mind of an innocent boy.

Now you’re talking Mage shit,
A’Meer’s voice said.
You led them, and you know it.

“My words, your voice?” he whispered. The night offered no answer. “Damn, A’Meer, I miss you so much.”

Kosar thought about where he could go, and as he began to examine the possibilities, each idea brought buried memories back to life—times and events he had not thought about in years. The experience was strangely comforting, and he enjoyed living these moments again. They were a distraction from the present.

If he carried on in this direction, he would soon come to the Mol’Steria Desert. North of that were the Mol’Steria Mountains and then Sordon Sound, the great inland sea that bordered New Shanti. He had never been as far as the desert, but A’Meer had often told him about it, sitting in the Broken Arm nursing a mug of rotwine as she relayed tales of sand demons and flaming trees, roads of glass and the huge, lumbering grinders that spent their unknowable lives turning rock into sand. It had all sounded so enchanting to him, the seasoned traveler, and he had promised A’Meer that he would go there one day. He’d seen an excitement in her deep, dark eyes as she talked about this place so close to her homeland. And though she denied it, he had always believed that she harbored a secret desire to go home. At the time, he had put her unwillingness to return down to some family problem, or an underlying wanderlust that she had yet to quench. Since then, he had discovered the truth.

Kosar paused and looked ahead. The dusk hid much of the land and turned the rest a pale silver, light from the moons splashing in seemingly isolated patches. There were rolling hills and hidden valleys, a landscape of shadows and shaded peaks, home to anything from a man to a herd of tumblers. The Mages’ army could be hiding within five thousand steps of where he was, and he’d have no idea until he stumbled upon it. And with that thought came the very reason he should not head for New Shanti: the Shantasi were the only people likely to raise a serious defense against the Mages, and New Shanti would become a battleground.

Kosar glanced behind him but saw no signs of pursuit.

If he went due east, he would walk into New Shanti across the plains, arriving eventually at Hess, the Shantasi Mystic city. Even before he knew that she was a warrior, A’Meer had told him about her youth spent out on those plains, patrolling the approaches to New Shanti along with others of her age. It was a rite of passage, ten thousand young Shantasi at any one time complementing the Shantasi army that made the plain its home. It was their most vulnerable point, and much of the year she had spent there had been in training for possible attack from the rest of Noreela. Kosar had scoffed at such an idea, but A’Meer had been grim-faced and serious. “Do you have any idea of where the Shantasi come from?” she had asked. Kosar had shaken his head, still trying to maintain his smile but failing beneath A’Meer’s glare. “Slavery,” she had said, and his image of the thousands of Shantasi children camped across that plain suddenly changed. Freedom was a luxury with a price. The Shantasi paid for freedom with their childhood.

Later, A’Meer’s revelation of her true nature—as a Shantasi warrior sworn to find and protect fledgling magic—had altered Kosar’s perception of her people even more. Now he imagined them as a fiercely independent race, lost and yet making their home here, on Noreela, and willing to give so much for the ground they had. A’Meer, he supposed, had scared him.

So that way lay New Shanti, and plains swarming with Shantasi youths willing to prove themselves adults. Their chance would come soon, Kosar knew. The Mages would be forming their armies and preparing to march. War was the only certainty in Noreela’s future.

Kosar turned away, a sickness punching at his gut. It was shame and self-loathing, but it was also a delayed reaction to what had happened. Fear, biting deep. Guilt, sinking teeth into his insides. He knew that it would never let go. He could walk forever and pass through Kang Kang, into The Blurring that many said lay beyond, and perhaps he would even reach a southern coast that no one had ever seen…but guilt would still be there, turning in his gut like a constant sword. A’Meer had died protecting what she thought was right, and now he was running away to save his own skin.

“No!” he said.
Yes. There’s nothing heroic here. Nothing symbolic. It’s cowardice. I can’t face the dark future with others, so I’m trying to do it on my own.

Trey and Hope think they have a chance to fight the future,
A’Meer’s voice said.

“They know nothing,” Kosar said. It felt strange talking to the dark, but it acted like a mirror, turning his words back on himself. He was talking to his own shadow, berating a solitary shape that stood here in the darkness while Noreela prepared to crumble. He touched his sword and felt sick at the thought of violence. Didn’t he have the right to be scared? He was a marked thief, and his fingertips stung as he touched the sword’s handle. Any success he’d had fighting the Monks had been a reflection of A’Meer’s bravery, skill and determination. He was just a useless wanderer. A middle-aged waster who could not even steal anymore because of his brands. No one trusted him.

A’Meer did,
A’Meer’s voice said.
And Trey, and Alishia, and Rafe. As for Hope…that damn witch trusts no one but herself.

Kosar closed his eyes and squeezed his fists, grimacing at the pain from his fingers but hoping it would drive A’Meer’s voice from his head.

“I’m just hearing things,” he said.

And then the ground began to move, and he was seeing things as well.

To begin with, he thought he had something in his eye. He lifted his eyelid and blinked rapidly, trying to expunge the hazing from his vision. Then he closed his eyes, and when he looked again the same effect was there: a blurring of the ground around his feet, as though the grasses and stones had lost their sharp edges. The death moon yellowed the scene and gave the undefined ground a creamy texture, and Kosar suddenly felt sick from the sense of movement.

He fell to his knees and vomited, and when he opened his eyes the ground was alive. It stirred beneath him, parting around the warm puddle between his hands, undulating as though the ground itself had turned fluid. He stood quickly, and for a few seconds he could make out the shapes of his hands in the soil before the shifting surface moved in to cover them.

“Oh fuck,” he whispered, because now he knew what these things were, and he remembered the last time he had seen them. They had presented a warning then, forming themselves as Red Monks into which A’Meer had fired several useless arrows. These were mimics. Knowing them, Kosar felt a vast, alien intelligence focusing upon him.

He wanted to run, but he was afraid of stepping on the mimics. Would he hurt them? Would they translate his fear into aggression? He closed his eyes and heard them shifting through grasses, passing over fallen leaves, moving around and beneath small stones, sending up whispers that seemed to blur the air as their bodies blurred the ground. His stomach still churned. He wished A’Meer were here with him.

Kosar tried to perceive a pattern or meaning to their movement. He could make out no particular direction. It was as though each mimic acted independently, fulfilling its own aim. Whatever communication might pass amongst them seemed to dictate no combined purpose. He wondered if they were eating or sleeping, talking or conspiring, and then the ground broke before him and a shape began to rise.

It formed so quickly that it was fully there before he had time to truly comprehend what he was seeing.

A’Meer stood before him. But this was not A’Meer as he had ever seen her. There was no smile on her pale face, no mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes, no sign that she saw or heard or recognized anything. The mimics had formed her upright, but this A’Meer was dead. Kosar had no doubt about that: her legs were gashed, her stomach and chest a mess of protruding flesh and bone, her throat gaping like a screaming mouth. Even her head was cleaved down to between her eyes. He could see her shattered skull and exposed brain. The mimics were meticulous in their detail. This was A’Meer as they had last seen her, lying dead back in the Gray Woods while he was probably still running up the slope to the machines’ graveyard. They had seen blood pulsing from her throat, and they copied that action now. They had seen her right eye ruptured and leaking onto her cheek, and that image repeated itself here. She was dead, his beloved A’Meer…and yet her mouth moved, as though she were trying to inhale one last time, or expel one final word.

“A’Meer,” Kosar whispered, though he knew it was not her. Still, seeing that image, her death hit home like never before, and Kosar started crying. Tears blurred the vision, and then the scene distorted some more as A’Meer came apart before him—flesh flowing, bone melting away—and sank back into the uniform mass of mimics shifting across the ground.

Kosar tried talking to them, asking what they wanted and why they had shown him this, but the mimics suddenly flowed to the east as fast as a man could run. The movement upset his senses and sent him tumbling to his left. He fell, rolled, and when he looked down, the ground was itself again. The mimics whispered away.

“A’Meer,” he said again, but no more thoughts were spoken in her voice.

Yet as the impact of viewing her death hit home, Kosar began to wonder what message the mimics had been trying to convey. By showing him a vision of A’Meer, what could they possibly have been trying to communicate? And why?

Before, they had revealed themselves to Rafe, the carrier of the land’s new magic. But he was simply Kosar. He did not understand. He could not attribute intelligence to such small things. Hive organisms, Hope had called them, their whole effect the sum of their parts. They had shown him A’Meer, dead and bleeding, her mouth working at the air…

“Final words?” he said. “Final wish?” Or perhaps the mimics themselves had manipulated her image for their own ends.

The darkness seemed deeper than before, and more filled with unknown things. Kosar had never been too proud to admit fear, and he was scared now—more of the things he did not know than of the things he did. Rafe’s marking by magic and his subsequent loss must have affected the land far deeper than Kosar could have imagined. The mimics’ appearance, and the fact that they seemed to be offering help, was as disturbing as it was shocking. He had never even heard of their existence before a few days ago. Now they were trying to send him a message.

What else could be stirring across the land?

He stared into the distance, and suddenly the blank twilight offered him a revelation: the mimics had cause to deal with him! Rafe was dead and gone, and yet they still bothered with a cowardly thief fleeing something he did not understand.

Something he
could
not understand.

They still had cause to appear to him!

He started running back the way he had come. He had been gone for an hour, maybe two, and he hoped that they were still there.
Don’t be gone,
he thought.
We need to talk. In the name of the Black, we need to talk now more than ever before!

Stomach aching from his bout of vomiting, hand still giving him pain, Kosar ran once again, feeling the weight of Noreela falling heavier on his shoulders the closer he came to the fallen machine.

THE OTHERS WERE
gone. The space between the shattered ribs was devoid of life, as though the machine had stood here for a thousand years and its insides had long since rotted away. Kosar stood panting, just outside the circumference of ribs, staring at the emptiness within.

Gone!
He had come unerringly back, navigating through the twilight by instinct alone. It had only taken him half an hour at most, but in that time Hope, Trey and Alishia had left, abandoning this site of Kosar’s betrayal and heading south for Kang Kang. He looked in that direction and saw its peaks on the horizon, low and distant and yet menacing even from here.

“Mage shit!” Kosar thumped a rib with the heel of one hand and it crumbled, sending creamy shards to the ground. So strong before, now so weak; he was amazed that magic could change so much. He circled the machine, trailing his hand along the ribs and the hardened skin that still hung between some of them, thinking about the short time this thing had been aloft and what it had been trying to achieve. At first it had simply moved them away from the danger: the Monks, the fighting machines, the Mages and their Krote warrior. But after that, when the danger had seemingly passed, it had turned south and continued on that course, so definite in its direction that it must have been intentional. Rafe had said that he needed to go to Kang Kang, and Kosar had assumed it was so he could hide. But perhaps there was something else. Maybe he was missing the simple truth, too eager to let fear and confusion cloud his judgment.