Dusk (4 page)

Great place to work,
Alishia thought for the thousandth time.
Opposite a slaughterhouse.
Because that’s all it really was. She had once seen a man shoved from the Tumbling Window for stealing coins from a street trader to buy rotwine. His wife stood and watched as he fell, his knees popping, ankles breaking, ribs cracking inward and spearing his lungs. She squatted by his side as he gasped bloody bubbles into the heat of the noonday sun. Then she smiled and left him to die alone.

These were bad days indeed, and Alishia knew how lucky she was to be the librarian, in charge of one of the least-visited buildings in the city, unknown by most, usually ignored even if someone did recognize her. Perhaps people believed she would have them arrested for talking in her hallowed hall of books.

As she started down the street she realized how pleased she was to be out of the building. It was an alien feeling because she loved it in there, but today had been tainted by the activities of the weird old man, and she felt lighter of step and heart now that she was away. Even Noreela City—dark, dilapidated and sad—was welcoming in its own strange way. Perhaps she really had escaped some awful danger. Whatever the reason, she felt an unaccountable high, unhindered by the constraints of worry and stress.

A woman passed by, trailing a snake of children behind her, all of them painfully thin and pocked with weeping sores. The woman was a barrel of a person, rolling along with great strides. Her jowls almost touched her chest, which itself could have easily harbored a herd of tumblers beneath its mammoth overhang.

“Spare some tellans,” the woman croaked, “we’ve not eaten for a week.”

Alishia could see the truth of the statement in the children’s eyes, and the lie in the woman’s.

“I’ll give the kids tellans,” she said, reaching into her backpack.

“They’re my kids.”

“All of them?”

The woman refused to look away. No shame. “Some of them.”

“I’ll give the kids tellans,” Alishia said again, and the woman nudged her aside with one fleshy elbow and continued on her way. As the line passed her by, Alishia rustled in her bag. She gave the last child—a pale-faced, sad-eyed boy—a sprinkle of silver tellan pieces. He smiled his thanks but it did not reach his eyes.

Alishia stood in the shadow of an abandoned shop and watched the straggly line disappear around the corner. There were other people on the streets now, sleepwalking from buildings at the end of a day’s work, little to look forward to at home, even less in the bars, where all the talk would be of failing crops and how the tumblers in the hills were taking more children and elderly each month. There would be arguments between those who believed it was due to the carnivorous plants being more confident, and those who blamed the Cataclysmic War. That old war, ended long before anyone alive now had been born, had replaced the gods as the ultimate scapegoat.

Alishia believed both were true. One fed the other.

Bad days indeed.

ALISHIA SLEPT ABOVE
a stable on the outskirts of the city. It was cheap for two reasons: first, the stink of horses was rank and the noises unpleasant; second, the nearer the edge of Noreela City, the more dangerous a place could be. There were stories of Noreelans being dragged from their beds by mountain bandits, raped and eaten, only their heads and feet remaining when they were discovered days later (the heads because they were full of impure thoughts; the feet because they had walked in shit). There were all manner of unpleasant stories abroad these days, but that did not necessarily make this one a lie. Alishia slept with a knife beneath her pillow.

Most mornings she was woken by the horses stirring and shitting and being fed by Erv, the stable lad who had more than once tried to force his way into her room. She would stir slowly, listening to Noreela City waking up around her, smelling breakfasts cooking on iron skillets in the streets, tasting the rankness of the stale food she’d eaten the night before. Erv would talk louder than he had to and exercise the horses below her window when she was dressing. She always kept her knife close at hand. Erv was a nice lad on the surface, but his eyes shone with lawlessness.

This morning, however, something else brought Alishia from dreams of a field sprouting rotten corpses. She was glad to be awake, but for an instant she thought she was still in her dream. She could smell the acidic scent of burning. There was shouting coming from an unknown distance, the meaning of words stolen by street corners. But panic in the voices could not be disguised.

Instinct told Alishia that it was still the early hours and yet she could see around her room. Her clothes were in a careless heap on her chair, like a figure collapsed from exhaustion. She stared at them and they moved.

Her hand slid under the pillow so quickly that she pricked her finger on her knife. She yelped and fell from the bed, never taking her eyes from the shape on the chair, pulling the blade from beneath the covers and cursing when they entangled her hand, panicking and twisting the blankets more, expecting at any second—

But they were only her clothes, and the illusion of movement was given by the flickering light outside. The shifting, wavering light of a fire. A very big fire.

Alishia rushed to the window, completely forgetting her nakedness and the possibility of Erv already being in the yard below. The city glowed in the night, lit from the center by a huge conflagration. It was not the location that convinced Alishia that it was the library. It was not even the disturbing events of yesterday. Ash revealed the unbearable truth. That, and the thousands of burning pages fluttering in the air like incandescent birds.

“No!” she said, instantly thinking of the man in red with the broken book beneath his arm. “Oh
no
!”

Outside, fire turned the nighttime streets to dusk. People bustled and hurried and there was a surreal, almost carnival atmosphere as Alishia pushed her way through the dawdlers and curious. Food vendors were hurrying toward the fire, pushing their carts before them, obviously anticipating a profitable day. Families were trailing along the streets, moving aside whenever a horse-drawn cart came by, babbling excitedly the nearer they came to the conflagration. Alishia tried not to cry, but the smoke stung her eyes, so at least she had an excuse. Her rough cloth dress itched and scratched where she sweated, perspiration dripping with her tears to the old stone streets of a city that had been neither kind nor cruel to her, merely indifferent.

It seemed that this night, that state of affairs had changed.

As she entered one of the east squares and fought her way through traders setting their market stalls for the day, a cry went up. “Fire!” someone shouted, others echoed it, and Alishia almost laughed out loud. The column of smoke already reached the heavens, flames licked and danced at its base and the stench of burning overrode even the warm tang of oiled spices and freshly squeezed rhellim. How could they only now acknowledge its existence? But then she saw the flaming stall in the corner of the square, and she understood. Before, the fire had little to do with them. A distraction, a novelty, something to chat about while they awaited their first customers of the day. Now it had touched one of them by sending down a flaming page from a book, kissing a stall-covering alight, seeding itself away from the library. The threat of it engulfing all of their lives became immediately apparent. A couple of the traders rushed to help the frantic owner haul what she could away from the voracious flames, but most merely tried to protect their own stalls. They threw buckets of water across the canopies, packed away stock, calming their mules as best they could.

More flaming confetti floated down from the sky. Some of the little fires had burnt themselves out before they hit the ground, but a few—those feasting on a particularly rich history text, perhaps, or those with several pages stuck together by time—blazed into whatever they touched.

A man bashed at his own head to put out the flames in his hair. A woman squatted and pissed on her burning furbat. Novelty mutated into panic as the whole city seemed to speed up. Where people had been walking they now ran, where they’d been running they were now sprinting, whether toward or away from the fire. Water carts careered through the streets. Barrels bumped and spilled their precious cargo back into the gutter, and by the time Alishia had run to the fire, there were already several wagons parked around the old, misshapen library building. Groups of sweating men and women swung buckets back and forth, fire glinting on their strained faces, skin seeming to stretch and redden even as they worked.

Hopeless, Alishia knew. All hopeless. There were a billion places for the flames to hide, and even if they did manage to douse the conflagration and drown it from the fabric of the building, the books would smolder and simmer inside, the fire biding its time, ready to leap out and finish the destruction as soon as their backs were turned.

Why she personified the blaze she could not guess. It scared her at first, giving it a soul, an aim, a cruelty that she could barely comprehend. But then she thought of the man in red as he had left her library, the broken book beneath his arm, the torn and tattered pages he had been sitting amongst when she crept between the stacks to spy upon him.
Nothing,
he had said, but he had been lying. He had found something. And once that something left the library with him, perhaps there was no reason to leave anything else behind.

“You bastard,” she said as she watched the building burn. What right did he have to destroy history like this? “Oh you bastard!”

THE MILITIA CAME,
more to clear the streets than investigate the burning. Alishia told them who she was and they asked a few perfunctory questions. When she mentioned the man in red they seemed not to hear. They ushered the crowds away and left.

She stayed by the library for three days, watching as the building folded in upon itself, giant roof members exposed to the air like blackened ribs, only walking back to her room at night. Life went on around her, ignoring her grief. A man was sent from the Tumbling Window, but she barely registered the sound as he hit the ground.

On the third day a thunderstorm—mockingly late—extinguished the last of the smoldering ruin.

At last the librarian could pick her way into the rubble. There was very little left. Some of the book stacks still stood, but their contents were charred into one hard mass, knowledge petrified by fire. In there perhaps pages still read correctly, but Alishia could not find the will to go through every blackened lump, searching for whatever dregs of history may have survived. Instead she pushed them over and watched them crumble into black paste.

Crowds passed by the ruin with nary a second glance. The library was no longer interesting now that the fires had burnt down. Really, Alishia knew, no one had ever found it interesting.

Except for one man. An old man, so old that he should have been dead. The first dead man that Alishia had ever heard sing.

Chapter 4

RAFE’S ONLY SENSE
was touch. He could feel the hands holding him down, the water sluicing his body, the rough scouring of something scraping across his stomach, his chest, then down between his legs. He struggled, but to no avail. He tried to open his eyes, thought he’d succeeded, but he saw only black. Either he was in total darkness or he was blind. He could not smell anything, and although the water trickled into his open mouth, there was no taste.

He was panicking, but it seemed at a distance, a remote fear for the well-being of someone he knew only vaguely. It was a sensation he had felt before. When he was young he stole a bottle of rotwine from Trengborne’s shop and sloped out into the fields with his friends. He felt big and brave, but within an hour of the first gulp he wished he had never even heard of the drink. He had often wondered why those men and women sitting inside and outside the tavern looked so lifeless, so devoid of emotion, and now he had found out. Everything receded until there was only fire in his veins, blurring the edges of his senses.

His father had found him and dragged him back to the house, sat up with him all night until Rafe came to and vomited across the floor. His parents did not tell him off. They said he had scolded himself, and that they hoped he had learned a lesson.

His parents. They were kind and thoughtful, not impulsive and cruel like so many people he knew. They were also open and honest, and he loved them for that. Most people would have chosen never to tell their son that he was not truly their flesh and blood; that they had found him out on the hillside, a babe abandoned by rovers or a family too poor to care for another child; that though both as barren as some of the village fields, they had been so desperate to have a child that they had taken him and called him their own. Such honesty had troubled him at first, but in time it had made him love them even more. The trust implicit in their telling of the truth revealed the depth of their feelings for him.

And now they were dead.

“Dead!” he shouted, but hands pushed him back down as he tried to sit up, and he realized they were trying to help. The washing had stopped and now he was being dried with a rough towel, the cuts on his legs and arms stinging as clumsy but caring hands scoured them.

Rafe sat up again, pushing at whomever held him down. He touched his face to see if his eyes were open—they were—and the confirmation helped his vision creep back. With it came sound, and smell. He looked around, sniffed and began to wish he was still unconscious.

The room could have been a slaughterhouse, or a refuse tip, or perhaps it had been used to house corpses during the Great Plagues and someone had forgotten to take them away. The stink of rotting meat was tremendous: a heavy, warm, sweet smell that twisted Rafe’s guts into agonized knots and brought saliva to his mouth. He hated himself for feeling hungry. He looked around to try to find the cause of the stink, but he saw only the huge man who had been tending him. Perhaps, he thought, this person was the source of the smell. It seemed all too likely, judging by his appearance. Over six feet tall, all of it scruffy and filthy, a beard that housed tiny crawling things and arms so hairy that they looked like furbats attached to his shoulders. The man’s face was scarred down one side, old whip-wounds black as death. Rafe recognized the signs of a tumbler attack from the stories he had heard back in Trengborne.

“Boy?” the man said, and it was as if the ground had spoken. His voice sounded like rocks grating together.

Rafe raised his eyebrows, too shocked to answer.

“Boy,” the man said again, smiling slightly. The smile tempered the voice and made it kind.

And then Rafe looked into his eyes for the first time, and he saw a cool, calm intelligence there, something belying his appearance. Rafe knew those eyes, recognized that intellect.

“Uncle Vance?”

“Rafe,” the huge man grumbled, “my boy, I haven’t seen you for so long. What in Black’s been happening? Why’re you all bloody and cut up?”

“Uncle, they’re dead,” he said. Actually saying it seemed to make it all final and real, and the dregs of unconsciousness flitted away to the corners of the stinking room. “All of them. Mother . . . Father . . . everyone.”

“Royston? Dead?”

“Dead,” Rafe said again, and began to cry. He tried not to blink because every time he shut his eyes, images of his slaughtered parents came to him. But keeping his eyes open made him cry more.

Vance, his expression one of stunned shock, came to him and held out his arms, touching Rafe’s lips with something cool and rank. “Best sleep, then,” he said, and before Rafe could reply, sight, taste and sound faded out once more. The final sensation was his uncle’s hand on his brow, shaking slightly as the big man shed his own shameless tears.

“HE RODE INTO
the village,” Rafe said. “Then he killed everyone. And there was nothing anyone could do. The militia fought him, but he killed them. He had arrows in him and bolts and everything, but still he walked and killed. I watched him from the hills when I escaped . . . I watched him die, I think . . . but then I was followed. I think he’s following me.”

“A madman. There are many of them nowadays.”

“But why kill Mother and Father? There’s no rhyme, no reason.”

“People don’t need reasons,” Vance said. “They just need the urge.” He stared off into the corners of the room for a time, though Rafe was sure he was seeing much farther. “Royston,” he muttered, and shook his head.

“How did I get here?” Rafe asked through their shared pain. “I don’t remember. I know I came down from the hills, there was something following me, but I don’t know how I found my way here.”

Vance looked up. “There was someone following you, but it was no madman. He brought you here after you collapsed in the street.”

“Who?”

“Some thief.”

Rafe shook his head, frowning.

Vance grunted. “He knew where I was, somehow. Said he’d been here before. Said he’d been most places.” He hawked, and spat a huge gob of mucus onto the floor. “All the damn trouble there is in the world, and you get mixed up with a thief.”

“I wasn’t mixed up—”

“I know, I know. That’s not really what I meant.”

Rafe watched his uncle move across the room and open a cupboard. He brought out a bottle and uncorked it, slurping noisily as he downed half of its contents in one swallow.

“Aren’t you going to tell anyone?” Rafe asked.

“Huh?” Vance’s eyes were glazing.

“We have to tell someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I have to go back, bury Mother and Father, do something . . . do something for—”

“They’d have been taken by now, by
things.
Night things. And Rafe, there’s no one to tell. I could ride five days to Noreela City, and if the wraiths or tumblers or bandits didn’t get me first, and if they even let me through the city gates, they’d ask me why I’d come. Then they’d laugh and send me away again. Trengborne is an unknown little village in a big bad world. Nobody would give a Mage shit about what’s happened.”

“But
everyone’s
dead!”

Vance stared, and Rafe felt himself shriveling beneath that gaze. It held knowledge of all manner of things, and most of them must surely be bad. “Two moons ago, so it’s said, a village two days to the east—two days nearer Noreela City, mind you—was swallowed up. Sucked into the ground by a sinkhole. Everything mixed and blended into a soup. A thousand people. And you know what they sent from the city? Nothing. No help, no militia, not even a Mourner.” He looked at the ceiling, took another swig from the bottle and belched. “Everyone dies. It’s just that these days, people are doing it more often.” He drained the bottle and smashed it into a corner. “Nobody cares anymore.”

Vance found a fresh drink and virtually dismissed the terrified boy. In minutes he was drunk and dribbling, and a long hour later he was asleep.

Grief threatened to overwhelm Rafe, but anger held it at bay, or at least kept it contained. Perhaps shock was still shielding him from the reality of the moment, deadening what had happened. He shed more tears, held his head in his hands and tried to remember all the good times.

LATER, RAFE LEFT
the room and found his way out from the mazelike building. People were lying in hallways, asleep or dead. Rats rooted around and under them, crocodile beetles sought moist holes, and the slew of protection charms drawn on the walls in faded blood displayed a desperate, superstitious hope in a magic faded into myth. Rafe was not used to seeing such signs and they stirred something unknown within him, a memory that had never happened. He traced one sigil with his finger, and the dried, crusted blood scratched his skin.

The stink of his uncle’s room seemed to have percolated throughout the whole building. Either that, or every room stank.

Rafe wondered who the thief could be. There was Kosar, the worker in Trengborne, but they had never even spoken to each other. And surely he would have been killed along with everyone else.

He found his way out of the building. Weak sunlight greeted him and, though they were frightening and strange, he introduced himself to the afternoon streets of Pavisse.

HE HAD HEARD
much about the town. Some of it was hearsay, rumor passed through the young community of Trengborne and propagated by their desires of what the big town could offer. Some was from his parents, usually accompanied by warnings never to go there. It was a useless place, they had said, marked only by crime and badness, in dire need of rescue. Rescue from what, they had never expanded upon, and neither had they explained their stern words of caution.

Rafe felt as if he was betraying his parents by even wandering the streets, but venting his grief in the presence of his drunken, frightening uncle felt worse. And it was such a strange and shocking place that curiosity got the better of him. Somewhere, perhaps that vague idea of help still existed . . . but it was a nebulous concept now, as distant as he felt.

Pavisse was a mining town first and foremost, and most of its inhabitants had something to do with working the ground. Groups of miners strode along the street, proudly wearing the unavoidable badges of their trade. Coal miners had leathery black skin and broad shoulders. They also bore scars and injuries from the many accidents and cave-ins underground: missing limbs; empty eye sockets; faces cleansed of anything approaching joy. Those who dug fledge had eyes yellowed from their constant proximity to the drug, and bald scalps, a side-effect of its use. They were tall and thin, willowy men and women who twisted and turned their way through the many fledge arteries that networked the underground. They stared at something far away—memories of better lives, perhaps—and to Rafe they looked like ghosts seeking somewhere to lie down in peace.

The miners had something else that set them apart, and it did not take long for Rafe to realize what it was. Three fledgers shoved him aside, walked on without giving him a second glance, and he knew then what he was seeing: total disregard for anyone other than fellow miners. Not just ignorance or aloofness; they could have been a different species.

Before long, Rafe became completely overawed by what he was seeing. In Trengborne, a simple farming village where the folks worked to live, and lived simply, there was little out of the ordinary. Rafe had seen a raid by tumblers when he was very young—he remembered them congregating around a fallen child, playing with him, toying with their prey before one of them rolled forward and pierced him with its barbs—and sometimes, in dreams, he thought he remembered a wraith. But other than that, nothing
extreme.
Here, the sights saturated his senses very quickly. Rafe’s simple perception of things was soon drowned out by the excesses of Pavisse.

A man was lying in the road being kicked by three coal miners, their boots impacting with his head and stomach and groin, and yet all who passed averted their eyes. The victim looked like fodder—dregs of an ancient race once bred for food in Long Marrakash—and although Rafe had never before seen one of these sad creatures, he hid his fascination and walked on. Elsewhere, a naked woman sat in a rocking chair in a doorway with her legs wide open, beckoning men to sample her wares. One fledger stopped, did his business there and then, paid her and walked away. The woman put on her stock alluring smile once more, scanning the street, eyes glazed with bad wine and skin grayed by years of rhellim use. The display was horrific and sickening, and Rafe thought of the many rumors he’d heard from the young men in Trengborne. Naked women in the streets, they had said. It had sounded dreamlike. In reality, it was a nightmare.

He passed through a narrow byway and emerged into a huge square bounded on all sides by buildings four stories tall, all of them seemingly overflowing with people waving long scraps of colored cloth. They were relatively silent, although the strange sounds of grunting, feet scraping on stone and heavy breathing seemed to give a secretive whisper to the crowd. Every now and then the impact of wood upon stone or something softer inspired a groan. Rafe stood back for some time, unable to see past the knot of people standing before him. He stared up at the windows and balconies, trying to make out from their expressions what these people were watching. On a few faces he saw vague disinterest; on a few others, outright fascination; but generally they seemed excited and enraged at the same time. He’d seen similar expressions on the faces of the rhellim-fueled whores back in Trengborne, desperate for business but sometimes, when the militia were away, ignored and looked down upon.

He pushed his way through the crowd.

They had a tumbler in there. It was a big one, obviously well fed in this gladiatorial ring. The wooden pen had walls twice the height of a fledger, curved inward at the top, spiked with barbed metal prongs to prevent the tumbler from rolling out. Rafe had once heard that they reacted to sound, zoning in on playing children or couples courting in the long mountain grass. That explained the silent spectators.