Dawn (22 page)

“I won’t just roll over and die!” he said.

“Heed my wisdom! It’s the end of the Shantasi.” Elder Darshall’s gaze went to her hand once more. “Mystic Delgon, guide my hand.”

O’Gan moved, but he was already too late. Darshall clasped the knife with her other hand and ripped upward, slitting her stomach, leaning forward as she turned her hands and angled the blade to the side. He caught her as she fell, smelled her insides and felt the warmth of the steam rising from her spilled guts, and he saw the instant that life left her eyes.

“I hope you’ll be at rest,” he said. “But it’s not the end until every last one of us is dead.” He laid her along the stone sill of the fountain and knelt beside her, chanting her down into the Black, trying to keep his mind from her story but all the time desperate to believe that she could no longer hear his words, see his pale face, smell his fear.

He left the square and headed back into the heart of Hess. He looked for shifting shadows on the way, but anything watching from the darkness kept to itself.

O’GAN PENTLE HAD
been a Mystic for more than fifty years, but he had no idea how to command an army. That was the job of the Elders, passing orders down from the Temple to the upper echelons of the Shantasi forces, commanding them here, there, back toward the sea and out into the edges of the Mol’Steria Desert. True, he had trained warriors in his time and sent them into the world, condemning them to lonely vigils for absent magic. He often wondered where his charges were and what they were doing. Mystic he may be, but he had never traveled beyond the boundaries of New Shanti. He had read much about Noreela City, the Cantrass Plains and Long Marrakash, but he had seen none of it. The warriors he trained were destined to see the world, while he, a Mystic committed to the good of New Shanti, was tied to his land.

He had trained warriors, but that did not mean he could command an army.

They can’t all be giving in,
he thought.
They can’t all be
killing
themselves!

He hurried through the streets of Hess, hating every sign of the panic that had spread through the Mystic city. The streets here were mostly deserted now, many inhabitants having fled eastward toward where the sun should rise. Clothes lay trampled into the dust. A chair lay on its side beside an ornate iron door, and beyond the open door O’Gan could see the insides of a wealthy home, tables heavy with precious statuettes and floors carpeted with rugs woven by Cantrass Angels. Whoever had fled this place never expected to return.

He could barely believe what was happening. The city was retreating without any thought of protecting itself, listening without question to the mad mutterings of the Elder Mystics and panicking at the sight of their public suicides. And why not? They were held in such high esteem, and if they viewed death as the only escape, what hope could anyone else raise against this catastrophe?

O’Gan craved news from the north. Poor A’Meer, perhaps she had been making her way back to Hess with news of magic reborn and recaptured by the Mages. And if that was the case, then other Shantasi warriors could be making that same journey even now, crossing the dangerous Mol’Steria Desert or sailing across Sordon Sound, to find Hess abandoned, its populace running like sand rats from the jaws of a desert foxlion.

“We’re not cowards!” O’Gan said. A man and woman huddled beneath a small lean-to darted away, startled from their hiding place. The man looked back at O’Gan, recognizing the garb but fearful of the barely contained rage in this Mystic’s voice. “We need to stand and fight!” The man put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and hurried her on. “You!” O’Gan shouted.

The woman stopped and shrugged the man’s arm from her shoulder. She turned, and O’Gan saw the cool determination in her eyes. “The Elders are killing themselves,” the woman said. “Mystic, I have respect for you, but I also respect their message. There is no hope for the Shantasi against the Mages, they say. How can we believe any different? It’s a new New Shanti today.” The woman lowered her head in brief deference to Mystic O’Gan and then hurried away with her husband.

“It is,” he said. “A new New Shanti.” He sat on a bench beside a tall hedge and rested his head in his hands. He needed food and water, but there were enough homes left open for that, and he would feel no guilt at the theft. He would need weapons too. His own roll of weapons was back at the Temple, but he would be able to find what he needed here at the edge of Hess.

He wished he could ask the advice of an Elder, but he already had their story. They were dying into history, hurried there by their own fearful hands. O’Gan, the dusk, the fight to come—that was the present.

Every moment wasted was one step closer to defeat.

O’Gan stood to prepare himself for the journey westward. There, he hoped, he would find enough of a Shantasi army to command.

Chapter 9

ALISHIA WOKE, BUT
she found the waking world uncomfortable. Her vision was bouncing left and right, her stomach ached, her bones felt as though they were being forced together at the sockets, ground into place as though to merge with one another.

A pair of shoes moved in and out of her field of vision, heavy leather soles bound with donkey hide and tied with twisted reed.
A fledge miner’s shoes,
she thought.
They’re passed down from father to son. Rebound, rewound, the soles smoothed and shined by decades of use. They’re part of a proud miner’s possessions. That and the disc-sword…

I’ve seen that disc-sword red with blood.

She was being carried. And there was something wrong with the ground. No plants, no moss, no soil or dirt, just bare rock, cracks and fissures free of soil or dust, surface smoothed by time. It looked silver in places, yellow in others, as though the moons were fighting for control of this strange land.

Alishia was not sure where they were. They had been heading for Kang Kang, but now Trey was rushing somewhere with her slung over his shoulder, and in his shadow there was no sign of the disc-sword.

I need to know where we are,
she thought.
I need…
She closed her eyes and, like a babe in arms, the movement of Trey’s journey across this weird landscape lulled her back to sleep.

FROM THE DARKNESS
came the smell of burning paper and charred wood. There was heat as well, though it may have been her own breath. She breathed in, out, and realized that the burning also came from within.

Alishia opened her eyes. The library was still ablaze.

She chose a route between two tall book stacks. Flames erupted at various heights, eating a thousand lives and leaving many more in place. Perhaps those surviving would burn later, perhaps not.

She ran. She was not certain what she sought, but this library was no place to be sure of anything. She waved her way through a sheet of flames. They did not affect her, yet she smelled the charred stench of another moment fading away.

I wonder if that was someone I knew,
she thought. She paused and turned around, reaching for a burning book, pulling it from the shelf, letting it fall open in her hands and seeing only three words before the fire ate them away:
never knew her.
She dropped the charred mess and it broke into dust.

She ran on, ducking through the flames and never fearing them. This was
her
place; they could not harm her here. The passage remained straight for some time, and though she passed a thousand books every few seconds, she knew that they were not for her. Something was drawing her toward a truth that she must discover.

There was the place below the library, the cave, but she had been there already and it provided only a warning.
Hope,
she thought.
I didn’t see her when I was awake. And Trey was
running!

Something fell in the distance. A book stack or a wall, a floor giving way or a tower of loose books tumbling as fire ate away at their foundation. Alishia paused and turned, trying to decide which direction the crash had come from. Millions of books dampened the sound. She turned left and right but the noise faded away, and there was nothing to do but carry on running.

It’s coming apart so quickly,
she thought.
The fire spreads faster than I could have believed.
She jumped through another wall of flame and crashed into a pile of books, falling to the floor, barely feeling the impact.

One of the books landed beside her, flipping open at a page begging to be read. She closed her eyes. Closed the book without looking. Opened her eyes again and glanced at the spine:
A Heartbeat in the Heart of the Sleeping God.
She pushed the book away and it opened again, and she read of Hope in the belly of the beast.

Only bad could come of this. Trey was running toward something awful, and she had to wake to tell him, warn him, because only
bad
could come of this.

Touch its heart and Hope fades away,
the line in the book said. The only line. The rest of it was yet to be written.

HOPE WAS A
young girl again, exploring north of Pavisse on her own because nobody wished to play with a witch. There were occasional friends, but they kept their distance, as if she really could plant some dubious spell on them. She asked her mother why they were like that, and her mother would smile, her green tattoos twisting around her neck like a snake tightening to withhold her answer.
They’re scared of you,
she would say.
They know what you can do.

But Hope knew that she could do nothing, and her child’s brutal logic revealed the truth: other children did not play with her because they thought she was a fool. Even a child knew that there was no magic. Hope was a fool from a long line of fools, and children did not suffer fools gladly.

She had been to these woods many times before. They were familiar to her, and safe. It was a fine day, the sun was warm and kind on her face, and the first of her many tattoos was healing on her right cheek.

She paused and smiled, and felt the tattoo do the same.

The forest was small but few people visited. The people of Pavisse had more to trouble themselves with than walks amongst the trees, unless the walks themselves were toward something relevant. Once, she had been in the woods when a man ran past. She ducked down but he had seen her. His eyes turned left, wide and fearful, and he watched for a couple of beats before running on. Hope remained hidden for a while until she heard the dogs, and then she stood and revealed herself to the militia so that she was not attacked. They did not ask whether she had seen the man, and she did not volunteer the information.

Another time, she had stumbled across a couple having sex. The man was old and gray, the woman younger than her, and Hope had kept a guilty watch on them for over an hour while they fucked, rested and fucked again. There was real passion between that old man and young woman, and Hope felt sorry that they had to come this far to be on their own.

Later that day she had told her god about them, and it had given her its customary silent reply.

She reached her god in the ground and knelt before it, almost touching its surface, almost feeling its coolness or warmth, its smoothness or rough skin, the stillness of death or the invisible vibration of life. She had never touched her god, and she never could. Gods were not for that.

She began to mutter invocations she had heard her mother using, words and sentences in a language forgotten by most.
It’s the language of the land,
her mother had told her, and Hope’s memory did its best to repeat the words as they had been spoken: the same tone, same intonation.

It’s a machine,
a soft voice whispered. It was her voice, but she did not like to listen. It told painful truths.
It’s just a dead machine.

Something tickled her hip and she slapped at her clothes. Nothing changed.

She chanted some more, bringing her hands so close to the god half buried in the ground that she could feel its gravity pulling her closer and closer. One day it would move, she knew. One day she would come here and present herself before this god, and it would rise, and she would become the first real witch since the Cataclysmic War had stolen magic away. One day she would remember the correct invocation from her mother, mutter it in just the right way, and this god would shrug off its layers of rust and moss, bird shit and decay…

It’s just a machine, and you’re wasting your time. The only gods are the Sleeping Gods, and they’re just a story your mother tells you when it’s too stormy outside for you to go to sleep…

Another movement against her hip, grotesque and familiar.

Hope looked around the woodland glade but the light was starting to fail.
Dusk isn’t for hours yet.
A light blue haze rose from the ground, wafting around her knees.
It shouldn’t be this dark.
She was farther away from the god (
dead machine
!) than ever before, and then the smell of pine and wellburr trees faded away, replaced by the dust of ages.

I only wanted a god to give me magic,
she said, and her young woman’s words woke her with their old lady’s voice.

HER FINAL WORD
faded away, swallowed by the walls. No echoes here.

The gravemaker spider flexed in her pocket. Hope had been lying on her side, and the spider had obviously been crushed from its hedgehock sleep. She sat up and reached into the pocket, grabbing the spider by two legs and letting it dangle before her. Its other legs clenched, its body rose, but it could not bring its fangs close enough to bite.

“I’ve been away,” she said, and an endless amount of time may have passed. Nothing would have changed in here: the walls would still glow, the floors would still swim in that strange, opaque mist…and the thing on the pedestal would still be there.

She could not bring herself to look, in case there was an eye staring back.

Hope waved the spider before her, holding it at arm’s length. “Shall we stand?” she said. She stood, still clasping the disc-sword in her other hand. She was shaking. Still she could not look at the Sleeping God. She thought of that young version of herself, worshipping the hunk of rusted metal and cracked stone in the ground, and she was ashamed. So long spent kneeling before old magic, while the true gods were older still.

Her legs shook. Her tattoos writhed of their own accord as her face twitched, nerves jumped. She needed to piss, but the thought of doing so here terrified her.

She almost looked…

The spider curled around her finger and scraped her nail with its fangs.

“Almost,” she said. She dropped the spider, kicking it away from her, and watched it scurrying through the haze toward the pedestal. As it drew close, the Sleeping God entered her field of vision, and then she looked because there was nothing more to do, no more distance to travel, no more dreams to be had between that instant and the next.

She had spent so long imagining what this could be like, but she never believed it would be her.

“Wake,” she whispered.

She could make no sense of what she saw. Her eyes took in the shape but her mind could not translate the vision.

“Wake for me!”

The shape remained motionless. It was the size of ten people curled together, limbs and heads and torsos twisted around one another. She could see no eyes, hear no breathing.
It
must
be alive,
she thought, but she was too insignificant to understand. She stood in the presence of a god, and all she could do was ask it to wake.

She took one step forward and there was no scream of outrage. She could look at the thing now, and though she was unsure of exactly what she was seeing, at last she believed her eyes.