Dawn (30 page)

KOSAR WAS CONTENT
to let the Monk walk ahead. The Monk seemed to accept this. It led the way and Kosar followed, always keeping his sense of Kang Kang’s presence to his right. If the demon tried to edge him northward away from New Shanti, he would know.

He chewed on the paste, welcoming the numbing relief. He did his best to ignore the suspicions that arose in his mind. Taking a drug from a Red Monk? Following it? Not questioning its route, its cause?

Trust the Monk,
A’Meer had said in his dream. And while he was certain it was nothing
more
than a dream, he did not believe that A’Meer would betray him, even in memory.

Two hours after leaving the ravine, the land began to change. Heathers gave way to hardier plants, the ground cover of grasses and moss became patchy and the smell of the desert drifted in from the north. Heat rode on the breeze, even after several days without the sun. The smell of spice rode with it.
We’re approaching New Shanti,
he thought. In all his years of wandering, Kosar had never been there.

The Monk stopped ahead of him, drew its sword, and its robe blurred as it became a confusion of swinging limbs.

Kosar dropped to one knee and drew his own blade, grateful for the weight of steel in his hand.

The Monk grunted and slipped onto its back, and shadows swirled above it.

Kosar stood, moved a few paces forward and then paused again.

The Monk lashed out. Something screamed long and loud, and another hack from the Monk’s sword ended the cry.

Kosar could smell blood now, mixed in with the warm hint of spice, and he moved forward again.

“Stay back,” the Monk hissed.

Kosar obeyed, happy to leave the demon to its fight.

What are they?
he thought.
Skull ravens?
There were several shapes dancing around the Monk, darting in and away again, squealing as its blade found them, hissing as they attacked again. The Monk seemed to have limitless energy; the fight went on for some time, and Kosar could not help recalling A’Meer’s tale of her clash with a Monk on the steam plains of Ventgoria. That had lasted a whole night.

The Monk screamed and turned, fell and jumped, ducked and sidestepped, and more shadows fell. It stomped them into the ground whilst continuing its attack.

Kosar sat, wincing when he reached out one hand to the ground and found sand pricking his fingertips.

The fight ended as quickly as it had begun. The Monk dropped one final shadow and stepped back, tripping over its own feet and landing hard on the ground. Kosar went to it, his sword drawn in case the things rose again. As he closed on the fallen Monk, he was not sure which to keep his eyes on the most: the Monk, its bloodied sword still pointing skyward; or the dead things on the ground, their shapes indefinable, their smell mysterious and potent.

The Monk saw him coming and stood.

“Sand demon,” the Monk said.

“Just one?”

“They have many parts.”

Kosar looked down at what the Monk had done. He could not identify any of the parts on the ground. There were long, thin shadows that may have been tentacles, one small round chunk that could have been a head. Flames seeped from some of the wounds, weak and blue, guttering and going out as Kosar watched. The Monk trod down on one of the larger flames and crushed it into the sandy soil.

“It was a strong one,” the Monk said. “They usually don’t come this far south. They stay in the heart of the desert, preying on those foolish enough to cross.”

“How do you know all this? Surely you don’t spend much time this close to New Shanti? The Shantasi hate the Monks.”

“Everyone hates us,” Lucien Malini said. “And I know because I spent a lot of my youth reading.”

“At the Monastery?”

“Yes, there was a library there. Huge.”

“Alishia is a librarian.”

The Monk raised an eyebrow in surprise but said no more.

They walked on, moving together this time, but it took Kosar some time to say what was on his mind. “That thing would have killed me.”

“It may not have revealed itself to you. Sand demons are not all of this world. They…span.”

“But if it had so chosen, it would have killed me.”

The Monk grunted. “They’re very strong, yes.” He nursed his left arm, chewing herbs and pressing them into wounds hidden beneath his robe.

I’m thinking of the demon as a “he” now,
Kosar thought.
I can’t let myself trust it.

“It revealed itself to you,” the thief said.

“As I said, everyone hates Red Monks.”

They walked on, crossing land that was quickly turning to desert.
A hundred miles to Hess,
Kosar thought.
Maybe a little more.
He wondered what would happen when the Shantasi discovered him in the company of a Red Monk.

The Red Monk who had killed A’Meer.

Kosar stared at Lucien Malini’s sword.

TREY WAS IN
the home-cavern back in the fledge mines, alone this time, and there were a hundred fledge demons in there with him. It was dark and he made his way by touch, but whenever he neared the entrance to a current mine working, the pain came, so loud and brash that he scampered back into the cavern, hiding in caves, circling the great pillars and lying low in the Church.

The Nax made the darkness their own, creeping around him with every heartbeat. He could smell them, taste them on the air, and they were as alien to him as the topside he had never seen.

He moved across the cavern floor, dodging heavy points of darkness that signified a Nax. He approached another mine working and felt a different pain possessing the rest of his body: the agony of wanting. The scorch of the fledge rage lit up his flesh and bone.

Perhaps one of the Nax would save him? They were fledge demons after all, coated in the stuff, some even said they were made from fledge in its purest, most intense form. Perhaps one of the Nax…?

He moved forward and the pain exploded in his mind.

For an instant, the home-cave was illuminated. The Nax were not ignoring him at all. They were gathered around him, some less than an arm’s length away. They hung from the ceiling high above on threads of fledge, crawled on the walls of the cavern before him, slid up and down the wide column fifty steps to his left, all
staring
at him, surrounding him as completely as the darkness that quickly returned.

He opened his mouth to scream, but the Nax were the air.

He ran toward the tunnel once again, certain that its dark mouth was the only place where the Nax had not gathered. Heading for topside brought the pain again, lighting his way and displaying in a flash the hundreds of Nax lining his route. They reached for him as the light blinked out—limbs, wings, flaming tongues—but none of them could touch him in the dark.

He reached the mouth of the working and entered, running through the agony of his upper body.

It’s the fledge rage,
he thought,
torturing me more than the wounds Hope gave me, tearing me up from the inside, giving me nightmares when I’m already in one.

He ran through the mines, cringing away from the walls of Nax that each flash of pain revealed. It was as though they saw him only when the pain came, but by the time they reached for him he had willed it down again.

The light became more rhythmic, the pain more regular, the claws of the Nax closer and closer to ripping into his dreaming flesh.

He saw himself through their eyes, with their minds. He was nothing amazing at all.

TREY OPENED HIS
eyes. However terrible reality might be, he welcomed it.

He was cold. The sky was stained the color of stale fledge by the death moon. The life moon seemed to be fighting a losing battle, and Trey stared at it in the hope that it would grow.

His head thumped with fledge rage. A lump of it—a grain, fresh or stale, beneficial or fatal—would take the pain away. Fledge would carry him home, back to the place he should have never left. Sonda and his mother were dead down there in the ground, two miles below and hundreds of miles away from him, but at least he would have been dead with them had he found the courage to stay.

His arm and chest were boiling hot, freezing cold. Blood still flowed freely across his body, passed between his arm and his side, tickled his armpit, seeped to the ground and dripped down onto the thing Hope had recently emerged from. Trey could feel himself open to the night. He raised his good arm and laid it across his chest, and he touched the meat of himself there, parts he should have never felt. He stank of his own blood.

Hope killed me,
he thought, and his mind recoiled.
No!

He remembered the look on her face as she lashed out with his disc-sword. He had killed stingers with that weapon in the caves, and it had tasted Red Monk blood at the battle in the machines’ graveyard. Now its steel was smeared with him, its handle spattered with his blood, and perhaps soon that would be the last of him.

No!
he thought again.
Alishia…

A terrible fear took him, a dreadful certainty. He moaned and rolled onto his right side. His left arm struck the ground, the slashed muscles denying him control. The flame of agony illuminated his night for a few seconds, but this time there were no Nax waiting for him.
I dreamed them,
he thought.
They’re still my nightmare, even lying here like this.
He lifted his head and looked around.

He was lying where he had fallen, next to the hole in the ground from which Hope had emerged ranting and mad. Alishia had been lying close to him when Hope came up, asleep or unconscious, and he searched for her now. Perhaps Hope had gone mad and killed them both. Perhaps she had found her thing in the ground wanting, and now she was raving across Noreela seeking her own demise.

But Alishia was not lying where he had left her.

Trey rolled onto his back again and looked left, biting his lip against the pain. No Alishia.

Had the witch killed the girl and tumbled her into the hole?

He rolled again, shifting himself around to try to see into the ground, but there was still no sign of Alishia.

I need to sit up.

It took Trey a long time to raise himself into a sitting position. Each breath hurt, every movement was agony, and he was starting to feel faint as blood loss darkened the dusk. But once up he could look around, and he was now certain that Hope had taken Alishia with her.

There’s no way I can give chase,
he thought. He was sure that he was dying. The pain scoured his soul, seeking to pluck it from his body, and if that happened he would be just another lost wraith waiting for someone to chant him into the Black.
There’s no way I can go after her.
He looked south toward Kang Kang, those distant teeth set in the edge of Noreela. It had taken him an hour to sit up, and it would take him an age to go that far.

He tried. He managed to stand, swayed, biting his lip until he tasted blood, trying to chase away the faintness and find the stance that suited him best. He reached across his body with his right hand and grabbed his left sleeve. He lifted, head back so that he could look at the sky, and brought his slashed arm up until it was pressed across his body just below his chest.

He was crying. The tears carried a subtle taint of fledge and he licked them from his upper lip, knowing they would have no effect but welcoming their taste.

If I don’t die from blood loss, the fledge rage will be waiting.

He braced his left arm against his body, popped two buttons on his shirt and pushed his hand inside.

Trey gasped and almost fell. He thought perhaps he could move like this. His legs shook and his thigh muscles felt as though they were ready to cramp, but he set one foot in front of the other, one at a time, avoiding shadowed areas that might hide a pit or a hole, and he took ten steps south.

That’s how I can do it,
he thought.
One step at a time. Concentrate…There, one step closer to Alishia. And another…and another.