Dawn (17 page)

“How could they find out?”

Hope shrugged. “Maybe they’ll catch and torture Kosar. Or perhaps their spies won’t be as obvious as you think. Shades. Wraiths. Other things.” She grinned at Trey then, a toothy grimace that made him turn back to the ruined land. The noise was a constant rumble, interspersed with occasional thumps and vibrations as something dropped. At the base of the hill, perhaps a mile distant, the collection of debris was growing taller and wider, forming a barrier between the normal ground and that beyond.

A hissing white explosion erupted way beyond the barrier, pouring skyward and losing itself in the boiling mass overhead. Trey wondered whether this was a sacred river, revered like that one beneath the Widow’s Peaks. The eruption quickly turned from white to brown as sediment was sucked up from under the bedrock. The water continued rising, bursting out from several other points and emptying itself skyward.

An hour later it began to rain, and Trey sniffed the water for any trace of fledge.

HE MUST HAVE
closed his eyes. He was aware of the noises around him, and the heat of Alishia lying beside him on the dew-damped heather, but in his mind he was somewhere else. He was not sure where the other place was, but it felt safe and warm, insulated from the dangers he knew by the remoteness of memories. He could hear his mother singing softly in the darkness of their cave. He could smell Sonda’s skin and her breath as they passed each other in the home-cave, sharing a smile and averting their eyes. He could feel the faces of his fellow miners as they broke for lunch, hear their voices, wallowing in the good humor that came from facing the constant danger of the mine together. Trey was aware of his own breathing and the tickle of heather beneath his cheek, but it was only when he opened his eyes that all those feelings of safety and contentment vanished.

Hope had gone. Alishia still lay by his side, pale and warm, and he could see her eyelids flexing as she explored something unknowable in her dreams. Trey shivered and hugged himself, wishing he had fledge to touch Alishia and see if she was all right. Wishing he had fledge for himself. His heart beat fast, his breathing was shallow, and he felt certain that everything was about to change.

He stared up at the sky. The cloud was still there but it seemed to have calmed, its feathery edges being dragged close by its continuing swirling motion. Some shadows fell away and drifted down, but fewer than before, and the noise of things impacting the ground seemed less frequent. The cloud was a nothing against the darkness, a hole he could so easily fall into. There was no light below to give it any definition, and the moonlight above slid from it as though repelled by its unnaturalness.

Trey looked away, unnerved, wondering where Hope had gone.

He pulled his water canteen from his shoulder bag and poured a few drops into Alishia’s mouth. Her lips opened and her tongue protruded slightly, absorbing the moisture. Her eyes flickered open but seemed to see nothing. He leaned close and whispered her name, but there was no reaction.

Trey took one mouthful of stale water from the canteen and hid it away in his bag once more.

Still no Hope. He stood and walked a few steps along the ridge, looking down across the wide plains between them and the beginnings of Kang Kang. The ground was pale and gray, exposed rock casting back moonlight that slid beneath the cloud, and there were great swathes of shadow where darkness hid in hollows. He looked left and right along the hillside, back at the unsettling scene before him, and then he saw movement. It was like a beetle on the rough gray skin of an old pit mule, only it moved with more purpose.

Hope. She had somehow made her way through the great mountain of shattered trees and exploded rocks to start out onto the bared skeleton of Noreela. She moved carefully, glancing down at her feet yet seeming to concentrate on one single point somewhere ahead. The sky was heavy above her, still weighted with everything that should have been below, but the strange effect had ended. Trey could feel the unbearable pressure of it where he stood.

He almost called out to Hope, but realized that she was too far away. And he did not know what else could be out in the darkness, ready to home in as soon as it heard potential prey.

He rushed back to Alishia and scanned the ground around her. Hope had taken his disc-sword. Alishia stirred in her sleep and rolled onto her side, and Trey touched her to make sure she was still there.

She could have doped me,
he thought.
I was lying there both awake and asleep, and she could have doped me and made off with Alishia.
He touched the librarian’s hair, her neck, her back, and she was sweating and shaking as her bones and flesh faded away.
The old witch could have killed me.

The fact that she had left him alive brought Trey little comfort.

He managed to sling Alishia across his right shoulder and stand. He was amazed at her lightness. As he shifted her into a more comfortable position, she grunted and whispered something, but he could not make out the words. He paused, but she said no more.

“Not long,” he said. “I can move faster with you like this. And that Mage-shitting witch isn’t getting away this easily.” Whatever her motives, whatever her intent, Trey had no intention of being left alone with the responsibility for Alishia. Hope knew so much, and he knew so little.

For the first time in his life, he was afraid of the dark.

HOPE WAS WALKING
on the bare skin of Noreela. There was no evidence of time here: no buildup of soil, no rotting vegetation, no animal bones or skeletons of the unfortunate victims of Kang Kang. She saw no living or dead things marring the sterile perfection of this blank slate of the land, and she could smell nothing but the tang of exposed soil. The rock beneath her feet was dry and utterly bare. And it was warm. She could feel the warmth through her shoes. It was as though Noreela were alive, and for the first time its naked body had been revealed.

Perhaps this was a wound. She stopped and looked around, wondering what the blood of the world would look like. Above her hung the combined mess of everything fallen from here. Yet she was not falling. This strange effect had ended. She feared that soon it would reverse itself. Like the River San, the unbelievable weight of ground and rock above her would fall. Death would be quick when it came, but there would be a dozen heartbeats when she knew it was coming, and she had no wish to discover which memories would haunt those moments.

She did not look up. This was nothing compared to what she thought she had seen farther on.

She focused on where the white shape had marred the shadows, feeling her way forward with cautious steps. Occasionally she glanced down, stepping across cracks in the ground that gushed an unpleasant heat, jumping where those cracks were larger, changing direction where they were too wide to leap. The darkness within was impenetrable, as if the ground were filled with black water to its brim. She hated the warmth that rose: it reminded her of the rank moist breath of her thousands of lovers. Every breath a sigh, every sigh an unrealized dream.

She had been sitting beside Trey and Alishia when she saw the movement on the rocky plain. She was old and her eyes were poor, but she knew instantly what she had seen. The realization hit her like a solid force, a knowledge that forbore any shred of doubt, and her path was clear. Her breath stuck in her chest as though awaiting her action. She started running down the slope of the hill, her heart beating with more power and confidence than she had felt in years.

Down to the first wellburr tree, over its shattered trunk and onward; she had quickly negotiated the hills of debris, sinking to her knees in upset soil, tripping over a tangled mess of vegetation, gashing her arm on the sharp remains of an exhumed machine.

To Hope, it was the moment upon which the future might pivot.

Every few steps she remembered that white shape, how it seemed to lift out of the ground and melt back in, lit from within and exuding light when all else was darkness.

Sleeping God,
she had thought, and the very idea made her feel faint.

She went on. The incredible weight of the land above drew her gaze, yet she refused its lure. If she looked, it would fall. She kept telling herself that and, though absurd, it became the truth.
If I look, it will fall.

She leapt a crack in the ground and felt a warm breath rise within her skirts.

This was the true lay of the land. The exposed surface was Noreela in its infancy, stripped down to the blank slate upon which everything had developed: flora and fauna, man and beast, god and demon, all casting their own special places and building upon the structure of rock that was the foundation of the land.

She glanced down at the rock beneath her feet, suddenly terrified that she would see some ancient message carved there. But there was only stone, smoothed from eons of weight.

There were hollows here and there, burrows stamped down or scooped out by forces unknown. Shadows sat within them, shifting as she hurried by, and she did not pause to see whether it was her skirts making that soft hissing noise as they moved across stone, or something else.

“Sleeping God,” she whispered, eyes wide in case her invocation called it back up. But the place where she had seen the movement remained as dark as everywhere else. She did not look aside for too long in case she lost her way.

The Sleeping Gods had gone to ground millennia ago, or so the stories said. They were formidable beings, demons or angels of the land that had supposedly shunned limitless power to wander the wilds, learning and teaching, creating and building but never controlling. They had taken their fill of Noreela and all it could offer and put themselves into the ground, ready to sleep eternally unless something of deep interest woke them once more. They had their worshippers and cults, and there were frequent exhortations that their time had come again. But no Sleeping Gods returned, and the cults would often wither and split to regroup again under different guises, in different places.

Since the Cataclysmic War, it was whispered that they would awake when magic returned to the land.

Hope had always doubted the veracity of that legend. When the Sleeping Gods went down thousands of years ago there had been magic, although probably none that would be recognized today. Why would the return of magic give them cause to rise from their ancient hibernation?

And yet…

There was always a chance, and chance is why Hope had given herself such a name.

She was closing on the place where she had seen the movement. She had marked the place well: deep pit of shadows on the right, a raised area of cracked rock on the left. Glancing back, she could just make out the barrier of fallen debris and the low hill beyond. From this distance she could not tell whether Trey was still there. There was no movement on the plain of rock, though she was aware of the shifting way above her. It shook the air, thrummed in her teeth, set her hair on end.
If I look, it will fall.

She turned back, and for the space between heartbeats she thought the Sleeping God would be there before her, sleeping no more. She had heard a hundred descriptions of what they had looked like, and she was convinced that none of them did the Gods justice. Whatever she saw would be monumental and magnificent. It would strike at her heart with a sense of majesty, and perhaps there would be communication, an acknowledgment that she was the first living thing it had seen upon waking.

Nature going wrong will make everything right,
she thought.

But there was nothing there, only the rock and shadows, and the outline of Kang Kang in the distance.

Hope slumped for a moment, confidence and optimism bled by the dusk. But then she went on, because she
had
seen it—
had
seen that shape lifting from the ground then sinking back down. Perhaps the weak moonlight had revealed it…but she thought that maybe it had lit itself for her.

They’re as big as hawks, descended from the Constructors of Noreela, wandering its ever-changing landscape for a million years, teaching and learning, spreading and absorbing history, looking for something beyond the understanding of mere mortals.