Dusk (27 page)

The horses came quietly, but not so quiet as to be secretive. He knew who rode them. Hope panicked and Rafe spoke soothingly, reminded her of the skull ravens she had sent out, and soon Kosar and A’Meer rode into the circle of light cast by the fire.

A’Meer was dying.

Kosar took her gently from the horse and asked Hope about cures, antidotes, all the while refusing to see the witch shaking her head. Alishia watched, and Trey sat back in the shadows, keeping away from these new topsiders.

Rafe was told of a deep dread in the fledge miner’s mind. The whispers told him. The echoes of sunlight filled his mind with news.

Something huge was growing inside. It was a potential already fat with possible futures, all of them far wider and deeper than any he had ever dreamed possible. He looked down between his feet at the pale green grass, the dust, the corpse of the land that had been rotting for three centuries since the Cataclysmic War, when the Mages had taken nature’s trust and torn it asunder, corrupting themselves and that trust in the process. And the growing knowledge promised him a second chance. It was still hidden away, developing in safety, but already its tentative tendrils were exploring outward, experiencing Rafe’s own senses instead of feeding sensations to him. He knew the whole world—a million facts and the truth of a million rumors—and it would have driven him mad, had not the world itself been protecting him right then.

He went to A’Meer and she smiled at him, even though she could surely not see him through eyes so bloodshot that they looked black in the firelight. Her face and scalp were networks of raised veins, some of them burst and hemorrhaging beneath her skin, filling her insides with life-giving blood that would soon kill her.

“All because of me,” Rafe said, but A’Meer kept smiling because she knew who and what he was.

And then he touched her.

THE SHADE SAW,
and rose to the fore. Alishia stood and screamed, an exhalation of pure rhapsody, because the shade knew that it saw the future: its life, long and everlasting; its potential, realized again and again; its reward from its god, all of it earned, given and taken freely and with love.

It saw
magic.

Behind it, repressed beneath the sudden exultation, Alishia’s true mind recoiled in terror, letting out a scream far beyond the physical. The shade reveled in the feelings that evoked, rolled its soul around the other and pulled away quickly, tearing scraps from Alishia and watching them spin away into infinity. The time it had spent in here was a time without end compared to the eternity it had been less than nothing. And yet, alive though the shade was, it knew that it had to leave.

Magic! It had seen magic! The woman lay whole unbloodied and afresh, and the people watching had stood back or fallen down in terror . . . all but the boy who had laid his hands on the dying woman, dying no more.

The shade had something to tell its god. One more brief period of nothingness, back into the void, back into the blankness it so hated, and then as promised its god would reward it fully. Reward it with forever.

The shade’s scream belittled Alishia’s continuing psychic tumult, shattering her mind as it tore itself away, ripping her up as its immeasurable shadow tendrils withdrew, screaming again as it left the body and plunged back into less than nothing.

All the way back the shade screamed. But deep within the new thing that was its mind, where memories now dwelled and sensations vied to be recalled, it knew that its god would be pleased.

AFTER ALMOST TWO
days flying day and night, Lenora had lost several hawks and their riders. None of her Krotes had shouted or pleaded for help as their mounts slowly drifted seaward, and she respected them for that. They died with honor, having not even sighted their target. They were as much victims of the coming battle at those that would die on Noreelan soil.

They had fallen below the cloud cover now, and the sighting of their first boat caused much excitement. Lenora sent three down to kill the fishermen, and when they came back up they carried the heads of five people with them. They shouted, kissing the mouths of the dead, tossing the heads across to friends and branding themselves with Noreelan blood for the first time. Lenora let them celebrate. She knew that by the end of that day they would have reached the tip of The Spine, and from there it was another day’s flight across the Bay of Cantrassa to their target.

She listened for her daughter’s shade, but there was nothing but wind in her ears.

As she neared Noreela for the first time in centuries, she thought briefly of their initial discovery of Dana’Man, and how the Krotes and Mages had made it their own.

TEN DAYS AFTER
drifting northward from Noreela, they spied land. It was a vast white island, stretching as far as they could see to the east and west, and the Mages commanded that they should land there. Their ships had no supplies, the Krotes were injured and downtrodden, and a couple more days at sea would likely kill them all. Ice hung from their charred rigging, weighing the vessels down. The stink of death seemed to exude from the timbers. And although Lenora felt strangely reborn since Angel’s kiss, she knew that in those desperate days, death was never far away.

They approached a natural inlet and anchored. There was no sign of civilization anywhere: no buildings or boats, and no indication that anyone had ever set foot here before. No wildlife, either, and though that was strange, they were too tired and defeated to let it worry them.

The Krotes had all come from the many diverse races on Noreela, and they knew the legends of the northern seas. Wild lands, dead water, an infinity of lifelessness. Great snow clouds were already oozing over the white mountains inland, promising more heavy falls soon. Ice groaned and creaked around the bay. It nudged against the ships, exerting a painful pressure on the already damaged hulls. Lenora wondered what they would eat, should they decide to stay here. But right then, hope did not stretch that far.

S’Hivez appeared on the deck of one of the Krote ships. He took a rowing boat ashore on his own, climbed a rocky formation sticking out into the bay, made his way to the mainland proper and took out a knife. Even from where their damaged ships were anchored in the bay, most of the Krotes could see the splash of red blood on this virgin land. “You are Dana’Man!” S’Hivez shouted, and the land was named.

Thus ended Lenora’s journey from Noreela as a Krote of the Mages, and began her time on Dana’Man as one of their lieutenants. The time of the Cataclysmic War was over, and the beginning of their three-hundred-year exile was beginning. Magic had gone, though sorcerers like the Mages always had something about them. Chemicala, some said, tricks available only to those with the knowledge. But Lenora always believed that they had held on to some of the effects of magic, at least. They had been too wrapped up in it—and it in them—for all effects to vanish in that one instant.

Angel had given her endless life, after all.

DRIFTING DOWN TO
sea level, spying the faint haze of Noreela on the horizon, Lenora thought only fleetingly of her three hundred years on Dana’Man: finding the old civilizations there; the slaughter and enslavery; the eventual changing of each tribe to live the way of the Krote. That seemed more like ancient history than even their rout from Noreela beforehand, a brief, motionless interval in the long story of the Mages. A story in which she had become a major part.

As she led the first assault on the giant land of Noreela, and a new age began, she heard a shadowy voice at the back of her mind. As yet she could not make out what it had to say. But there was plenty of time.

LUCIEN MALINI LEFT
Pavisse on the fastest horse he could steal.

Behind him, the remaining Red Monks spread north and east from the town out across hills, through valleys, scouring forests and ravines, hamlets and farmsteads, searching desperately for the fleeing boy. They knew that if he and his band reached Noreela City they would be lost; they could go to ground there and remain hidden for weeks, and in that time the boy’s curse would be working its way out, filling him and spilling eventually to offer itself up again for abuse. Common folk of Noreela would welcome the magic back into their hands, but so would the Mages. And this time—Noreela’s armies too weak to fight, its people apathetic—the Mages would have their way. There would be no rout. There would be no repeat of the Cataclysmic War. There would be true cataclysm.

The horse pounded across the foothills, Malini urging it on, plains and woodland to their left and mountains to the right. As they skirted an old swallow hole the horse stumbled and almost spilled Lucien to the ground. He hung on to the animal’s mane, gripping with his knees, glancing back at the hole in the land and wondering how many more were waiting beneath the surface. Perhaps they would erupt and conjoin in one final explosive event, swirling the whole of Noreela into a giant whirlpool of earth and flesh, mountains and cities, people and dreams. The land was fading fast—he had traveled far, he had seen it all—and the Monks knew that its eventual demise, or a transmutation into something else entirely, would be the only final outcome. That saddened him, but it pleased him too. It meant that the Mages would be defeated forever. With no land there was no magic, and with no magic . . . the Mages would rot their lives away, unfulfilled, powerless, their evil fragmenting into eternity.

That thinking did not detract from his aims today. The future was a shy place, and it might be far different from how any of them imagined. The Red Monks believed in the final cataclysm, but there was no guarantee, no sure way to confirm their beliefs. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen a thousand years from now. However soon, now that magic was bleeding back into the land they had to fight to keep it from the Mages’ hands.

He was riding for the Monastery. The rest of the Order had to be warned that magic had returned. It had gone far beyond those few Monks who had searched through Pavisse, the one that had died in Trengborne without killing the boy. Rafe Baburn was young, naïve and inexperienced, and he should have been killed long before now. Three Monks dead already—each worth a dozen men in strength and tenacity—and still the boy ran, accompanied by the Shantasi and those others that had taken to his cause. Lucien did not mourn the dead Monks, but their failure rankled. This should have been finished already. And he knew that the more time passed and the more powerful the boy became, the more likely it was that the Mages would hear of magic’s reemergence.

There would be no recriminations, no blame, no reprimands; the Order was too mechanical for that. The fleeting idea that one of them should have ridden for the Monastery days ago, when they first got wind of the magic in the boy, flashed across Lucien’s mind but he pushed it down. The rage had been upon him. There had been no reason to believe that the boy would survive.

So he rode, heading south for the Monastery on Lake Denyah. Night fell and he spurred the horse on, riding by the light of the death moon. Howling things closed in on him and veered away again, smelling his rage and the heat of his hate. Heading away from the boy only kindled his hatred more. The horse stumbled and fell, tipping Lucien onto rocks, but he shrugged off his smashed shoulder and remounted, kicking the horse into a gallop once more. His shattered bones ground together in concert with the horse’s snorting. Blood clotted around the bones, easing them apart and stiffening his shoulder into a solid knot of scar. In one small valley he rode through decay, a place where the ground itself had died and was slowly rotting away to the bedrock, giving off a gaseous miasma that caught the moonlight and kept it for itself. Wavering images passed through. Lucien rode through the souls of the land, dispersing them, feeling their coolness, grinning as they tried and failed to freeze his blood. Wraiths called to him in the night but he ignored them, unconcerned at such nebulous entities. His mind was focused on two things: the future—the magic, the return of the curse that had ruined the land.

And reinforcements.

Chapter 19

DEATH BEGAN AS
a dust mote in his eye.

Jayke Bigg rubbed at his eyelid, blinking fast, thinking that perhaps the sea breeze had blown grit along the beach and into his face. He looked down at his feet and lifted his eyelid, giving his tears a chance to carry the offending grit away, seeing the broken shells scattered across the sand and wondering if anyone would ever see them again. And the dust in his eye, intruding into his senses like an uninvited ghost, where had that come from? A splinter of stone from a statue to some forgotten god? A shard of bone from an ancient sea creature, long gone and unknown to anyone alive today? Jayke was prone to such musings. Being alone at Land’s End made them inevitable.

He sighed, held his hand palm-up before him and stared at it, shifting his vision left to right. There was nothing in his eye. Perhaps it had been an illusion. He looked north again, at the place he was always meant to watch, and the sun shimmered the horizon into haziness.

Jayke resumed his stroll along the beach. He came down here from the cliffs every morning, leaving the old stone house that had been bequeathed him by his parents and theirs before them, enjoying the freedom of the wilds. He felt at peace most in the morning, when the sun rose from the end of the beach and the day’s worries and loneliness were still coalescing from the remnants of his dreams. Ring turtles flapped their way back into the sea farther along the beach, their eggs safely buried once more, and Jayke took his time walking that far. He wanted them to be in the sea and away before he dug up one of the nests and took the eggs for breakfast. He knew how they would taste: salty; mysterious; filled with tales of the seas that he could savor, but never know.

Gulls called from above, perhaps afraid that he would scale the cliffs and steal their eggs as well. Cave snakes sang from small holes low down in the cliffs, serenading in the new day before they slithered back into darkness to sleep the sun away. Bubbles the size of his fist blew in the sea-smoothed sand, exhalations of things buried deep.

Jayke paused and looked north again, an unconscious action that he probably performed a thousand times each day. It was as natural as the beating of his heart. This place was a dividing line between worlds, a true wilderness, where the known world of Noreela ended and the unknown, endless North Seas began. It had always been a wild place but, ironically, safe as well. He was here to keep watch for the direst danger of all. Jayke could not recall any real threats for him and his parents in all the years they had lived here. There were natural dangers, true: storms throwing gigantic waves at the cliffs; the extremes of weather through the seasons, crushing them with snow and baking them with sun; an occasional sea tiger, stalking from the waves and sniffing around their home, its tentacles never happy until they entwined around some warm, living meat. But no threats or malign influences.

Jayke reached the place where the turtles had spent the night laying eggs. He glanced to the north again, then bent and burrowed into the disturbed sand. He found five eggs, flaccid leathery sacs that would harden in his oven and taste wondrous with sea salt and lashings of soured sheebok milk. He stood, pocketed the eggs, turned back the way he had come, glanced north—

And there it was again, that speck in the sky that he had thought to be windblown dust. He paused, held his breath, looked slightly left and right . . . and the speck remained in the same place. Just above the horizon, shimmering in the morning heat-haze, a smudge on the clear blue sky.

Oh no.

Birds, perhaps? A flock of gulls?

It couldn’t be.

Too far out for gulls. Too steady.

Eyeglass!

Jayke dug his eyeglass from a pocket and opened it, cursing when he realized it had misted up against his sweaty skin. He wiped the lenses carefully on his shirt, never taking his eyes from the blemish in the sky just above the horizon. The fear was coming quickly, as it always did whenever he thought about why he was really here, why his family had lived in this place for generations. He went cold, sweat cooling him further, his heart stuttered, his stomach lurched and he was almost sick.

Dropping to his knees in the sand he brought up the eyeglass and stared to the north.

And then he ran.

No gulls, these. They were too far away to be certain, but they looked like hawks. Dozens of them flying in a loose formation, their massive webbed tentacles stroking the air almost gently, only needing a few swipes per minute to keep their bodies aloft.

Jayke sprinted along the beach, his footprints illustrating his panic. The turtle eggs bounced from his pocket and one of them broke on the sand. It was a bad egg, putrid. If he had eaten it he would have died.

He had read of hawks in one of the many books his family had accumulated. How they were spied only very rarely, how they normally remained way above the clouds, living there, eating, loving, mating, dying, disintegrating on the high breezes that kept them aloft even as they wasted away. He was heading for the path up to his house, and his weapons, and the doves that sat ready to be released with their warning. Because the only time hawks had ever been seen in a group was when they were controlled, harnessed and ridden like horses of the skies. And that was most common during the Cataclysmic War. Back then, the riders had been Krotes, the Mages’ warriors.

Jayke only turned to look again when he reached the foot of the steps leading up to the top of the cliff. He had dropped his eyeglass but he did not need it; the threat had closed in all too fast. In doing so the truth had seemingly manifested from his fears. These really were hawks,
huge
hawks, and although they were still miles out he could see the figures seated upright behind the creatures’ heads.

He started climbing. His life was over. He had never thought it would come to this—after so long he had come to believe that the Mages were dead—but now that it was happening he had purpose, meaning, a mission to fulfill before he died. Death was not a frightening prospect for Jayke. He had been here alone for so long, and he saw enough life and death in nature to know that it was an important consequence of existence. Not even the manner of his death worried him unduly; however unpleasant, the death moon would take him to itself and give him to the Black. The only thing that terrified him was failure.

He had spent his whole life here for one purpose: to give Noreela warning should the Mages return this way.

He was halfway up the cliff when he first heard the screams. Perhaps they came from the hawks, he thought. Or maybe the Krotes sitting astride their necks were calling out in glee at the prospect of spilling blood. Either way, Jayke ignored the noise. To turn around now he would have to stop, and that would admit defeat.

If only I’d stayed at the house, not gone for breakfast.

But he had to eat.

If only I could have enjoyed sitting and watching as much as I enjoyed walking!

But he had been here for forty years. He could not punish himself with thoughts of disgrace. Whatever happened now, he had already fulfilled his charge.

Jayke kept climbing, wishing himself higher and closer to the house. There were weapons in there, but first he had to free the doves. There were a hundred birds in all, fit and healthy, trained from birth to fly east and south until their message was delivered into human hands. And that message, tied ready in leather pouches on their legs, was stark and simple:
The Mages are coming.

That scream again, assaulting his ears and echoing from the cliff face. He could not help glancing back, and he saw that the hawks had spread out just above the water. There were dozens of them—maybe a hundred in all—and Jayke could not help comparing that number with those messenger doves he was desperate to release.

The Krotes started shouting as the hawks approached the beach. There was no meaning to their words, no language other than bloodlust.

Jayke was almost at the top of the cliff. He was exhausted, but fear kept him moving. Thirty paces, that was all, thirty paces to the house, and then he could do his best to give warning to the land. He looked back again in time to see the hawks sweep up from the beach and rise above the cliff, a living wave breaking violently against Noreela’s shore.

The flying things were even larger than Jayke had believed. Their hides were speckled black, partly transparent, hideous organs pulsing vaguely inside. They were fat and bloated with gases that aided buoyancy, and their beaks were as big as a man, serrated, yellowed and streaked with the remains of old victims. The downdraft from their movement sent Jayke sprawling to the ground, kicked up dust, blew grit in a whisper against the windows and walls of his house. They rose along the whole length of the cliff, rising on thermals as if blasted straight up from the beach, and most of them immediately headed south, across the island of Land’s End and toward Noreela.

Between here and Noreela lay the Bay of Cantrassa, four hundred miles of open ocean. Jayke wondered how fast those things could fly. And whether the doves would fly faster.

A dozen hawks dipped down and came at him, their riders screeching, raising bows and letting fly arrows. One struck Jayke in the shoulder and he spun and fell, cursing,
Not yet not yet not yet.
He found his feet and staggered to the door, pressing through as more arrows struck the walls around him, the door, his leg. He stumbled inside and kicked the door shut with his good leg, unable to turn in the narrow corridor because of the long shafts protruding from his shoulder and knee.

He was dizzied already by blood loss . . . and something else. His throat was swelling, his airway blocking, and he knew that the arrows were tipped with poison.

There was more screeching from outside. The sound of the hawks’ venting was like thunder against the house, and one of them landed on the roof, smashing broken tiles down onto Jayke’s head. The monstrous creature pecked at his home, and its disregard for his history made him mad.

A hole appeared in his roof, a ragged rent battered and enlarged again and again by the creature’s vicious beak. As Jayke leaned against a wall and slid himself along, vision blurring, a Krote peered through the hole.

“I haven’t killed for too many moons,” the Krote said, her voice surprisingly gentle and calm.

“Fuck you,” Jayke muttered, and the Mage warrior laughed as Jayke fell into the back room. His leg was a block of wood, his shoulder stiff and burning with shed blood, and as the poison coursed through his veins it was only rage keeping him moving. Rage, and duty. He
had
to release the doves, to warn the neighboring islands along The Spine if nothing else. He snatched a primed and loaded crossbow from the wall, glancing at the shelves of books he would never read again, and staggered to another door, this one leading into the aviary where the doves were waiting.

They were in tumult. A hawk had landed in the vegetable garden behind the house and it sat there snorting, blood and mucus dripping from its beak. The doves fluttered and fought to back away from the monstrous vision, pecking, crying, and when Jayke appeared in their midst they turned on him.

“No!” he shouted. He hissed to the birds, sounds and words that could communicate concepts and direction, and as the Krote sitting on the hawk started to laugh, the doves immediately settled.

Jayke fell on the handle that flipped open the enclosure. The screens fell away, the Krote raised his bow in a lazy, dismissive gesture and Jayke brought up his crossbow and let fly. The bolt struck home in the Krote’s left eye. Mortally wounded, poisoned, half-blinded though he may be, Jayke had lived alone for forty years, hunting rabbit and pheasant with his crossbow. Target practice was something he’d had a lot of time for.

The warrior let out a surprised gasp and tipped sideways in his saddle. The hawk seemed not to notice its rider’s sudden death, and it pecked listlessly at the ground as the Krote tumbled from its left flank and hit the dirt.

“First blood,” Jayke whispered. He hoped that it was a good omen for Noreela.

He hissed and whistled once again to the birds. They turned to look at him and it was almost as if they knew of his wounds, knew that this time they would not fly home. They cooed, their throats swelled and vibrated, their small leather message pouches so full of hope and desperation. And then, as one mass, they took flight.

Jayke slid down the stone wall, crying out as the arrow in his shoulder was snapped off. It had been morning when he found the turtle’s eggs, he was sure, and yet dusk now seemed to be closing in. The sky was growing dark. His vision was fading. And with a hundred doves in the air, it looked as if it were snowing.

The birds parted immediately, some darting south toward the Bay of Cantrassa, others heading east to the neighboring island of Bethwitch, thirty miles distant. The theory had always been that if the doves never made it directly to Noreela, the message would be carried back along The Spine by the communities living there. Now, close to death and near to warriors of the dreaded and despised Mages, Jayke wondered at his people’s naïveté. So much more could have been done, surely. So many more precautions.

Hawks swooped down, plunging through the clouds of small white birds and spilling them to the ground. Dozens fluttered and fell, twitching as they hit earth and rock, feathers exploding from smashed wings and burst bodies.

“All of them!” one of the Krotes commanded. It sounded like the gentle-voiced warrior from the roof. “Every single one!” The hawks swooped down and another dozen doves were shattered in mid-air. Some of the Krote riders took pleasure in the target practice, skewering birds with well-placed arrows. One of the hawks seemed to be in a feeding frenzy, following a small flock of doves, snapping at them, showering bloodied white remnants to the ground.

A Krote appeared before the open screens, short, thick sword drawn. The metal caught sunlight, and Jayke was glad for the brief spear of pain the reflection drove into his eye.