Dawn (24 page)

Trey looked down into the crevasse. A gush of dust had risen from the hole, hanging in the air and starting to drift back down as though given weight by the death moon. Only dust.
She seems so terrified
…

He stood and faced Hope. “What did you see down there?”

“You’re slow,” Hope said. “You’re weak. You’re of the underground, and the underground is all dead, all gone, all history turned to fucking stone!”

“What are you on about? What’s down there?”

“Nothing now!” She spat on the ground and stared at her mucky spit for a while, as though expecting it to come to life.

“Alishia said—”

“She’s all that’s left,” Hope said, her voice softening. “The only hope for the world. And you…you’re of the underground. Slow. Weak. Fledge rage taking you down.”

“Hope…” Trey stepped forward, hand held out. He didn’t know why. To take the disc-sword? To offer a comforting touch? The witch looked down at the sleeping girl, and when she looked up again her eyes had changed.

They were dead. Dry as stone, deep as the pit she had just emerged from, surrounded by the tattoos that seemed to contour her face around the two black eyes. “You’re no good for her,” Hope said. And then she lashed out.

Trey stepped back, but the disc-sword’s blade was spinning and the witch knew how to wield it. She pivoted forward on her front foot and slashed from left to right, increasing the killing arc of the weapon. Trey’s arm went down in a reflex action, and the sword passed through his bicep and into his chest.

It felt as though he had been splashed with freezing water. His skin opened and exposed his flesh to the night.

Someone shouted, and it may have been Trey. Blood warmed the skin of his arm, flowed down his chest and across his stomach.

I still can’t feel the pain,
he thought.
That’s bad. That’s shock. It’s like ice water…I wonder how far I’ll fall. I wonder what I’ll see.

For a while he was back in the fledge mines, because everything had gone dark. He was someone else communicating with his wounded body. He reached up and touched his own face, felt the pain and fear etched into his expression. Ran his hand down his arm to the ragged wound there. Across his chest.

She’s opened me up.

But to what, he did not know.

The darkness swallowed his mind as well as his senses. As he drifted away, Trey felt the first hint of the pain that would welcome him were he ever to wake again.

Chapter 10

A THOUSAND MORE
Krotes had arrived, and now it was time to march.

Ducianne left first, followed by her force of three hundred Krotes. Several flew, most walked, some crawled like snakes. They gathered at the western outskirts of Conbarma and then wound out across the plains, Ducianne at the column’s head, standing on her stone-slabbed machine and whipping her bladed hair from side to side. Lenora sat on her own machine and watched them go.
Bring me the Duke’s head,
she had told Ducianne.
I’m for Noreela City. Meet me on the way, or meet me there, in which case I’ll have already taken it.

And so the real war to take Noreela began. Lenora felt a thrill of history running through and around her; she was the hub of its stories and pathways. Things were closing in on her, and moving out. The past was ending at the tip of her sword, and the future would be built upon her actions. There would be stories and songs written about her, and her name would be uttered in awe. This stinking world had existed in a state of stagnation for three hundred years. The next few days would see more change than any Noreelan had experienced in their lifetime.

Lenora fingered the ears strung from her belt. She knew most of them by touch. Here was the Krote who had come at her a century before, determined to usurp her as the Mages’ most trusted warrior: Lenora had gutted him and sliced off his ear while he was bleeding to death in the snow.

And here, the large bristly ear from a wild creature they had found on one of the hundreds of small islands east of Dana’Man. It had lived in a commune of sorts, with roughly built homes, some attempts at crop growing and a range of basic weaponry. But it was more beast than human—not a race that could be incorporated into the Krote army—and Lenora and her fellow warriors had set about slaughtering its tribe for food and skins.

She ran her fingers farther along the belt, each dried and shriveled ear inspiring memories more powerfully than any smell or sound. Lenora was a creature of violence, and the feel of the knotted edges where she had slashed these ears from her victims set her heart racing. A woman from one of the tribes living in the glaciers of Dana’Man, a creature from the far northern shores of that damned place, a young girl who had come at her with a knife after Lenora had slaughtered her parents…

And then at the front of her belt, closest to the knot that held the leather tight, the still-soft ear of the watcher on Land’s End. He had been the first Noreelan to die at a Krote’s hand since the end of the Cataclysmic War. Lenora had killed him. That had felt good, and the ear belonged on her belt more than any other.

Soon there would be many more.

Her blood was up, and her dedication to the Mages made her proud. That distant voice may come and go, yet she had a land to subdue before she could pay it heed.

Lenora closed her eyes and banished her unborn daughter’s shade deep in her mind. Its time would come, but later. Much later.

Now there was blood to spill.

THEY RODE SOUTH
and passed through the cultivated fields surrounding Conbarma. Dusky light revealed diseased crops and trees, too far gone to have turned this way since the Mages cursed away the daylight. Lenora rode her machine along a rough dirt track between stone walls, but other Krotes rode across fields and through sparse hedges, kicking up the stink of rot from the ground. This was a crop that would never have been harvested. Lenora leaned down and plucked the fat head of a grass crop she could not identify. It was slick with decay, its yellow seedlings turned black and damp.

The fields soon gave way to wilder ground: the Cantrass Plains. Lenora had been here before. At some point in the next day she would cross the path she had taken three hundred years before, fleeing Lake Denyah with the Mages and retreating across Noreela to the foot of The Spine. She wondered whether she would know that place when she came to it, whether it would give her the sensation of having come full circle through life. Before, she had been running away. This time, she was on the offensive.

Lenora stood on the back of her machine and gave the order to increase speed. She was amazed and awestruck at the sight behind her. She had eight hundred Krotes with her, and for as far as she could see the landscape was alive with machines of all shapes and designs. The Krotes rode as if they had been born into this. Some had fashioned reins from rope or leather, preferring to stand as their rides loped across the landscape. Others sat back, sharpening weapons, checking quivers, greasing slideshocks, packing throwing stars, testing crossbows, or familiarizing themselves with their machines’ various weaponry. Fires exploded here and there when engines billowed gas. Some of them growled, as though already a part of the fight, and others darted about as if stalking something.

Moonlight sheened their way. They leapt over tumbled stone walls, skirted around trees, crashed through hedges, and Lenora could see the shadows of flying machines against the darkened sky. She wondered whether they could fly high enough to find the sun, but it was a treacherous thought, as though she was denying the Mages’ power.

The sun has gone,
she thought.
There’s no reasoning to that. It’s gone because Angel and S’Hivez wish it so, and they are the most powerful things in the world. Let the creatures of Kang Kang rise against them, let New Shanti unite in a final stand, let the Sleeping Gods rise. The Mages have magic, and its power is dictated only by the limits of their minds.

Lenora’s machine vaulted a fallen tree, but she did not even need to brace her legs. The ride was as smooth as floating on water.

THEY WERE MOVING
fast, and several hours after leaving Conbarma they encountered one of the Cantrass Plains’ shifting homesteads.

Lenora was astounded. She felt a flicker of admiration for the people who remained with this giant thing, trying to continue their ancestors’ lifestyle. The energy and effort expended in moving back and forth across the Cantrass Plains surely outmatched any benefit they may gain. Perhaps it was a way of keeping madness at bay, like a man clearing a glacier a snowflake at a time. There was no final aim in sight because it was impossible; it was the process that took time and diverted attention from more serious matters.

The homestead was battered and dilapidated. The remains of rope bridges hung at its sides, their treads long since decayed and fallen away. Deflated water sacs were home to large gray fungi. Its roof had cracked and crazed, and even from close to the ground Lenora could see that large slabs of rock were missing.

The machine’s legs had disappeared, and now its inhabitants pulled it on a carpet of logs.

A hundred people tugged on thick ropes, a hundred more pushed. Dozens of large cattle and a few bedraggled horses were attached in leather harnesses, whipped on by rovers standing on their backs. The machine moved minutely, creaking and cracking some of the logs underneath, and the people strained as they tried to find somewhere better. It was a monumental effort for minimal results, and Lenora wondered whether this same machine had been moving in the same direction for three hundred years.

She ordered the Krote army to halt and they watched for a while, amazed that none of the homestead rovers seemed to have seen or heard them. The light was poor, but the moonlight seemed to like these new machines of war, glinting from sharp edges and making their stony parts almost luminescent.

“How hopeless,” Lenora said.

The rovers pushing and pulling their giant, broken home were all heavily muscled, and yet they appeared tired and weak. Their feet were large and flat, their hands knotted into stumpy pads. Lights burned in a few of the homestead’s windows, and Lenora wondered at the hierarchy that allowed people to remain inside. The rulers, obviously. Tribal heads. Those with power or charisma, who could command the others to do their bidding.

The machine moved a step as they watched. Many people sank to the ground, while others dragged several stripped trees from the rear to the front. They placed them behind the harnessed cattle and horses, forcing them beneath the front edge of the homestead with heavy wooden hammers. Then they walked back to the rear and took up position again.

So here was the first real test. For three centuries the Mages had plundered the tribes and races of the huge land of Dana’Man and its neighboring islands, adding to their army, training it, instilling a hatred of Noreela—a land none of that army had ever seen and many had never heard of. Down the decades old warriors had died and new had been born, until a large proportion of the army was Krote through and through. Different toned skins, different hair, some tall, some short…yet all Krote. Bred to fight. Born to kill, and aid the Mages in their revenge.

Now Lenora would begin to see how dedicated this army could be. The battle for Conbarma had been a fight; this would be a slaughter.

Lenora turned around and spoke to the Krotes within earshot. “It’s a sad first challenge,” she said, “but it’s practice for your machines.” She nodded, and half a dozen warriors moved forward.

The rovers saw them at last. Some stood upright and dropped their ropes, rubbing their hands as if to massage some feeling back in. Others turned and ran behind the machine. The men and women whipping the cattle dropped their lashes, and the cattle relaxed, heavy ropes dipping into the grass, animals slumping to their knees and baying in pain and relief.

A few windows in the machine grew dark as the fires inside were extinguished.

Six Krote machines walked across a field of low, ropy plants, and the screaming began.

A hail of arrows dropped onto the advancing Krotes from atop the homestead, and they returned fire. A body fell to the ground, arms and legs thrashing. Another slid down the side of the huge structure and snagged on a rope, swinging there as blood darkened the stone below it.

The rovers who had been pushing the homestead ran, and two machines went in pursuit. One of them flailed its long metal arms, harvesting the people. The other machine coughed a wide spray of fire before it, lighting the dim scene. It stomped across its burning victims, crushing them into the undergrowth.

The other four machines reached the homestead. One Krote started slaughtering the cattle, using a crossbow to kill individual creatures while her mount fired a dozen spiked balls at a time from rents in its fleshy hide. A rover leapt from one of the horses and came at her, fearless and mad. The Krote let him get close before putting a bolt through his mouth.

More arrows were slipping from shadows as those within the homestead recognized that they were under attack. The Krotes went inside.

Lenora sat back on her machine and watched the display. Any anxiousness quickly melted away, and she felt a sense of satisfaction. These rovers had been battling to survive for centuries, and their history would be wiped out in minutes. It could be the same for all of Noreela. The timescales would differ, perhaps, but the result would be the same. In a few moments these rovers’ wraiths would be wandering with no one to chant them down, and their future would have been erased.

But that vision,
Lenora thought,
with no room for survivors of any kind.
She shook her head. Symbolism. Angel was fond of it, and she had used its touch to show Lenora what she wanted for Noreela.

Lenora could sense the effort every other Krote had to expend to refrain from joining in. The stench of burning flesh filled the air, and it was a smell that most of them had not experienced for some time. There were some with her who had landed at Conbarma several days before—captains now, blooded with Noreela’s first blood—but most of these warriors had not seen battle since long before departing Dana’Man. There
had
been fighting there, when the Krotes launched expeditions east or west along the seemingly endless island and encountered primitive tribes and settlements. And there were more ferocious enemies the farther afield they went, leaving the shores of Dana’Man and venturing out into uncharted and unexplored waters. On those unknown islands were unknown things, and some of them had offered a challenge.