Dawn (35 page)

Hope gasped. “How can you be sure?”

“I can’t,” Alishia said, “not
sure.
Not
positive.
” She gazed past Hope as though searching the darkness for some errant memory.

“So why say it? To scare me? To frighten me into taking you back to Trey?”

“Where
is
Trey?” Alishia asked, suddenly vulnerable and sad. It was strange to hear an adult voice coming from a body growing so young, and in that voice so much hidden wisdom.

“I told you, he’s gone. Back underground.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“He did! And if you want to reach the Womb of the Land you have to stick with
me
.” Hope stood and stared down at the girl, trying to read her eyes in the poor light.

“What are you doing, Hope?”

“I’m taking you. I’m
helping
you.”

Alishia shook her head. “You’re doing only what Kang Kang allows.”

Hope could feel the hatred pumping from the land, strong and repulsive. It made her skin crawl, cooled sweat on her brow, thumped pain into her heels. The ravine pulsed before them, as though darkness was the rushing blood of the land. She listened, but heard no sound of movement from in there. For a few heartbeats her visions swam; spots on her eyes, or giants stalking them in the distance.

“Nothing here is as it seems,” Hope said.

Alishia stood, holding on to Hope’s arm for support until she could stand on her own. They went east, hoping to find a way across the black ravine in that direction. The witch moved several steps ahead. She listened to Alishia following her, and after a while their footsteps fell in time with each other. If Hope had not known better she would have believed that she was alone.

Chapter 13

WITH NOREELA UNDER
attack in so many ways and so many places, one scene appeared serene. It was a haunted serenity, because the endless dusk seemed to suit this place. Darkness had always been comfortable here: dark histories, dark times. Water lapped at the lakeshore a few hundred steps from the building. Usually there were larger waves, but even the waters seemed to have been muted by the stealing of the light. Boats nudged against their moorings as the lake lifted and fell in a gentle, hypnotic rhythm, like the slowing heartbeat of Noreela. Bracken lay slumped to the ground in the darkness, its greenery fading into the soil with the rest of the land’s color. A few birds flitted here and there, but they did not sing. Something splashed, causing a line of ripples to spread from where the mystery creature had decided not to emerge. The darkness, perhaps, had changed its mind.

The building was huge, imposing. But no longer empty.

Beside the building sat a gigantic machine. Its wings were spread across the ground to either side, and several trees that had been uprooted by its landing lay splintered beneath its many feet. Its body swelled and shrank, swelled and shrank, and a mist hung around its various exhausts. Noses, perhaps, or mouths. One wing twitched and stripped the bark from one side of a living tree.

The machine was waiting. Its fleshy parts shivered, its metallic elements shone in the moonlight, its wings of wood and water and skin flexed and shifted, unable to find stillness.

Moonlight slid from the walls of the building and left it in darkness. There were windows, but they were pitch black. There were doors, but they remained closed. A gate in the building’s front facade had been blasted from its hinges and scattered in a thousand charred pieces. Some of them still burned. There was no breeze to disturb the smoke, and perhaps it rose forever.

Inside the entrance hall, something had conjured chaos. A huge timber staircase had been smashed to pieces, and some of the debris still smoldered along with the remains of the gate. Stone walls had been scored as if by giant nails. Tiles had erupted from the floor and been flung against walls, shattering and leaving parts of themselves embedded in the stone or timber. Beneath the tiles and their ancient bedding lay the rock of the land itself, and even this had not escaped the fury of destruction.

The Monastery had stood for a long time, and it would stand for a long time more. But its inside had been burned by unimaginable power. Something had passed through here, eradicating all evidence of the Monastery’s most recent inhabitants: the Red Monks. Robes were shredded, tables and chairs burned, food stores turned to rot, dormitories corrupted with feces and flame, kitchens stomped down as if by giant feet, and scars of the chaos marked every wall, floor and ceiling of the ancient building.

The Mages, in their wrath, could have easily destroyed the building itself. Their magic was rich and new and still being explored, and already they had powers that they had never before experienced. Maybe they could have tumbled walls and brought ceilings crushing down, but this had once been their home, before they were driven out and hounded from the land. The filthy Red Monks had taken it for their own, and perhaps the Mages could have touched the very heart of the Monastery and changed it completely, setting a seed of destruction to melt its stone skeleton, turning it into a lake of unstoppable fire that would spread over time; a year to reach Lake Denyah, five more to turn its waters to steam.

But they had come here for a reason, and their reason lay deep. Past the steps and basements, deep down where tunnels had been dug by unknown things eons ago, that was where their true destruction would be wrought.

And that was where they would have their first real taste of revenge.

“CAN WE KILL
fledge demons?” Angel said. “Oh, I think we can!”

The Mages stood at the junction of several tunnels, clothed in fire. Blue flames licked from their mouths, their crotches, their ears and eyes, and as Angel spoke, her words singed the air. The phrase became a distinct ball of fire, bouncing along the tunnels and disappearing into their depths.

She laughed, and coughed another fireball to follow her challenge.

S’Hivez was smiling, as he had been since their return to the Monastery. “We’ll make our own demons to kill them,” he said. “We can make a hundred!”

They had sent a sea of fire pouring along each tunnel they found, letting it find its own level. They listened for shrieks of pain but heard nothing. They melted the air, adding a magical slick of acid from their tongues that expanded and multiplied, flowing through paths of scorched air and disappearing along tunnels faster than a crossbow bolt. The Mages closed their eyes and waited for the psychic waves of agony, but none came. They were not concerned; not yet. Time was theirs. An easy victory would feel like no victory at all.

Angel and S’Hivez formed a machine from the rock of the tunnel walls, giving it drops of their blood and gasps of their fiery breath. It was more powerful than anything the shade had formed in Conbarma. Here they were using their newfound magic to its full, richer and far more potent than the taste they had left with the shade. A mockery of the things they sought to destroy, the machine tumbled down the deepest tunnel, scoring walls with molten blades and parting the thin skein of reality as it went. Its exhaust was a miasma of nonexistence that would wipe any living thing it touched from history and memory. A small tunnel rodent, blind and albino, was caught in the machine’s breath. Elsewhere in the caves, a thousand more rats ceased to exist. Droppings disappeared from corners never touched by light.

And as one rat inhaled, the bite scar on its ear mended itself, a scratch on a protruding knob of fledge smoothed over, and a million lice, worms, spiders and beetles existed again, suddenly uneaten.

The strange machine went on, carrying its new molten body around it, seeking the Nax and preparing to exhale again.

“And more!” S’Hivez said, conjuring chaos from the ground before him. Angel laughed. The air danced with things that should not be. They were back in their old home, more powerful than ever, chasing down the bastard Nax that had driven them out three hundred years ago.

The tunnels were illuminated with the sick light of dark magic.

The Mages paused and listened, touching the rock walls, sniffing the air, searching for the dying agonies of Nax. Still they heard none. They made yet more machines and sent them into the depths. One turned rock to ice, another made fledge unreal, yet another froze moments in time, halting history in small pockets of timelessness.

And then, tired of waiting, the Mages started to descend farther, moving deep on constructs of stone and water. They passed through tunnels cauterized smooth by the machines they had sent before them. Angel pressed against rock and summoned her dark magic, melting her hand inside to feel the beat of the land. She closed her eyes and sought the machines they had sent down, placing them all in a multidimensional map in her mind’s eye. Some had gone so deep that they had almost disappeared from Noreela entirely, while others had stayed shallow but traveled far. One machine—shredding the future and leavings shards of timeless vacuum in its wake—had passed beneath Lake Denyah, probing up and out in case the Nax had tried to escape that way.

“There’s nothing,” Angel said.

S’Hivez spread his hands and crunched his knuckles. “Then we go deeper.”

They felt the weight of the land weighing down upon them. The pressures were great, but the Mages reveled in them. Blue flames danced about them as they moved. The stone around them came alive and died again with each breath, and their dark magic filled them, brimming from their eyes as tears.

They found a fledge seam that had been opened and destroyed by one of the machines. Angel paused and listened at its entrance, sniffing, smelling the peculiar taint of unmade fledge. That was all. No echoes of a Nax’s dying sigh. She frowned—something about the ruined fledge did not seem right. She shook her head and they moved on.

They reached another fledge seam, this one untouched by their machines. Angel saw why: the exposed fledge was stale and rank. She scratched at the drug, snorting a flame so that she could see, and the heart of the fledge was also stale. She cut deeper, stepping on chunks of the drug and cooking it to nothing with the heat from her heels. S’Hivez stood back and watched, still listening for messages from the machines they had sent deep and far. None of them returned; their tasks remained undone.

Angel stepped back and turned to her old lover. “They’ve truly gone,” she said.

“No.” S’Hivez shook his head and blue flame trickled from his eyes.

“Yes. They’re not here anymore. The fledge is stale, and they’ve gone. But we
will
find them again.”

S’Hivez closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It came out as iced air. “They’ve denied us our vengeance.”

“Only for now,” Angel said, looking around, trying to convince herself. “We’ve got forever to track them down.”

“They’re the Nax. They could go deep.”

“We’ve more to do than this. There’ll be time. There’s
always
time. And besides…” Angel touched the rock of the land and let magic flow, turning stone to glass, illuminating it, letting visions flicker within its cloudy embrace. “…we have this. And we can always go deeper.”

The Mages left the machines to stalk and haunt the tunnels forever.

THEY MADE THEIR
way back up into the Monastery, emerging into its basements and pressing shadows aside as they climbed up to its ruined heart. There they found a shade cowering in a corner, invisible to those who did not know how to look. Angel conjured it to manifest before them, a silent void of potential.

It came, and Angel frowned. “This shade has something to show us,” she said.

OUTSIDE THE MONASTERY,
the Mages’ flying machine flexed its wings and knocked over another tree. It shifted its body across the ground, and the movement caused ripples to rise at the edge of Lake Denyah a few hundred steps away. Eyes flickered open and shut across its torso, and mouths gaped to utter deep, piteous groans.

The first time the machine fell completely still and silent was when it heard the land-shattering screams of rage.