Dawn (55 page)

The Shades moved like mountains, and the Mages fought back.

One of the Shades changed tactics. Instead of attacking the Mages, it assaulted their machine, melting across the ground and sending tendrils of shadow beneath the construct, then expanding again, lifting the machine up. It pumped more of itself under the machine, shrugging off the thing’s defenses: fireballs faded, arrows passed through and molten metal spattered on the hillside and steamed back to solid.

The Mages almost lost their footing. The female jumped and landed again, screaming a curse as she unleashed a stream of blue fire directly between her feet into the machine.

It exploded. Whether or not the Mage had intended this, the effect was devastating. The machine’s shell came apart under a ball of fire, chunks of metal and stone, flesh and bone spinning up and out into the air, streaming blue flame and smoke behind them. The two Mages went with it, visible for the first couple of seconds but then engulfed as their clothes and hair ignited. The ground beneath the machine erupted as though pushed from below, and soil and rock were powered out sideways.

Alishia and Hope ducked as the first of the debris struck the other side of the fallen tree, sending timber splinters carving over their heads. A wave of heat stole their breath, and the fringes on Alishia’s dress began to smoke. Hope patted at them, hissing as the skin of her palms blistered.

The roar of the explosion rumbled back and forth across the valley.

Alishia looked again. Hope grabbed at her but she shook the witch off. “I have to see where they went!” she said.

The entire slope below the Womb of the Land was ablaze. Green grass was black, lush trees were bare trunks, their leaves fluttering through the air, smoking and bursting alight when the heat finally dried them to nothing. The small stream had vanished, steamed away to nothing.

A ball of smoke and fire boiled into the sky. The construct was in pieces across the valley. Some of them burned, others seemed to be melting into the ground, disintegrating into their constituent parts of flesh, stone, metal and other material. Alishia scanned the ground around the site of the blast, hoping against hope that she would see the Mages burned to a crisp: charred bones cracked and coming apart just as their monstrous machine broke down into nothing.

The Shades had vanished. The Womb of the Land was as dark as ever, shunning the blazing fires that should be lighting its insides.
I’ll be there soon,
Alishia thought, and she hoped that they heard.

Something shifted before her, less than thirty steps away. At first she thought it was part of the machine, warping and cracking under the tremendous heat, but then it stood.

And laughed.

The laughter extinguished the flames licking at the Mage’s eyes. Its tongue flipped out and lapped up the remaining fingers of fire. It ran its hands down the length of its burnt and disfigured body, and wherever they touched flesh was renewed. The Mage rebuilt itself touch by touch, and by the time it reached its eyes, Alishia was already turning away.

“There you are,” the Mage said, its feminine voice as out of place as a shadow inside fire. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. You—and this place—have taken a
lot
of finding.”

Something struck Alishia from behind. She fell and rose again, and heard a scream as the ground rolled away beneath her.

HOPE REMAINED HUNKERED
down beside the fallen tree. Dead beetles dusted her legs. The dried husks of wood slugs fluttered around her feet in the wafting heat from the blaze.

She hugged herself, trying to crush away her fear.

The Mage screamed again, a venting of rage and frustration that set Hope’s tattoos squirming and lifted every remaining hair on her head into a filthy halo. She wanted to scream herself, but that would give her away.
And then she’ll be here,
Hope thought,
the Mage, that madwoman, and she’ll have me for her vengeance.
So she bit into the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger, tasting blood and concentrating on the pain rather than the scream.

The tumbler had come in from nowhere and snatched Alishia away. Three more followed, the last one running across Hope’s foot. Its spikes and barbs missed her, its weight held up on other whiplike limbs. It had left her alone.

She bit harder and closed her eyes and the Mage shrieked one more time, the sound receding as she ran after the fleeing tumblers.

Hope risked a look.
Alishia!
The girl was visible, pressed onto the side of the lead tumbler, her loose dress flapping in the breeze as the thing bounded down the hillside and across the base of the valley.

Alishia, she’s gone, all that potential stolen away!

The girl spun around and around as the tumbler rolled, but it did not crush her into its hide.

Of all the ravages of fate, all the whispers in the Black, why this and why now?

The other three tumblers slowed as the female Mage ran after them with unnatural speed. Her hair streaked out behind her, yellow and beautiful, and her feet pounded clots of mud from the ground.

Because they’re trying to help?

Hope caught her breath and dropped her bleeding hand from her mouth. She closed her right eye and saw red through the left, as though viewing a cloud-streaked sunset. The Mage neared the first tumbler and it swung around, reversing almost instantaneously to come at her. She barely broke her stride. A stream of blue fire burst from her chest, coughed up and out with a sound that reverberated around the valley. The tumbler rolled away, on fire. It struck a tree and became entangled in the vines that drooped from the lower branches, and soon the tree was an inferno.

The tumbler carrying Alishia disappeared behind a swathe of thick smoke, and the Mage gave chase.

Hope looked back at the Womb of the Land. The cave entrance stood dark and indifferent within a wide expanse of burning debris. As smoke drifted toward the darkness it changed direction, blown left or right by the cave’s invisible exhalation.

Where is he?
She remembered the male Mage from their fight aboard the flying machine, in those final moments when she had still believed that Rafe had a chance. Unlike the female Mage, he had worn his monstrosity with pride. “Where are you?” She scanned the remains of their giant machine, eyes chasing shadows thrown by the flames. “I could help them,” she whispered, testing the words in her mouth. She did not like them, nor what they intimated, but she had said and done many bad things in her life.

Nothing moved. Hope climbed over the fallen tree and started picking her way across the hillside, dodging the remains of the machine, stepping over a pool of jellied blood, skirting a scorched circle where something had melted into the ground.

I
could
help them,
she thought.
If it gave me what I want, I
could
help them.
She paused and looked to the sky. “But what in the Black would that make me?”

The voice that responded in her mind surprised Hope to a halt.
A liar.
The voice of her mother.

“There’s more to this than me,” Hope said, louder than she’d intended, and it was as if her words held the power to change.

Something else came into the valley, and initially Hope thought she was seeing reflections thrown onto drifting skeins of smoke. But then from the corner of her eye she made out bloody red smudges flitting through the air, drifting low to the ground as they made their way out of the darkness and into the light.

A shape appeared before Hope. It rose from a squat beside the entrance to the Womb’s cave: a ragged skeleton, unhindered by vanity or the need to reflesh its burnt self. The male Mage.

He roared a challenge, and the Nax flew directly at him.

WITH THE CONSTANT
spinning, bumping movement of the tumbler, Alishia passed out. Her senses faded, though she was still aware of where she was and what was happening. She could smell no fire, yet still it burned. She could not hear the angered screeches of the Mage chasing her down the hillside, but she knew that she was there, reclothed in flesh and filled with more rage than ever before.

Alishia thought that the Shades might take this opportunity to talk to her, but the man did not appear. She searched for the library but she could not find her way.

Hold on tight,
a voice said in her mind.
The end is almost here, and we have what you need.

Who are you?

I was Flage. Now I’m one of many. And you are the hope we still have.

I don’t understand…

That doesn’t matter. Almost there. Hold tight. We have everything you need.

Chapter 21

LENORA RODE THROUGH
the battle, dealing death here, avoiding it there, and something was happening to her. An ache in her groin; a feeling in her long-barren womb that she had not felt since her dead child was born in Kang Kang’s foothills hundreds of miles to the west. It was a hollowness aching to be filled, and though she could not accept that feeling, neither could she deny it.

Mother,
her daughter’s shade whispered, and Lenora asked, “Are you talking to me?”
Mother,
it said again,
why do you deny me?

“I don’t deny you!” Lenora ducked below a hail of arrows and rode away, rather than taking on those who had fired them.

Then come for me.

“I always said I would, but I have something—”

Something to finish,
the shade said.
Mother…you have a part in its ending.

“I do!” Lenora threw a star and watched it slice through a Shantasi’s exposed throat. She felt nothing; no glee, no sorrow. Her machine seemed to be looking at her, but when she glanced down she could see nothing in its eyes.

Her womb ached with wanting, and Lenora shook her head, angry. “On
my
terms,” she said. She rode on, and her daughter whispered, and a sudden splash of blood across her chest made her retch.

WHEN THE MACHINES
came, everything changed. Until then the Shantasi had been fighting well, cutting down the shambling dead and making sure they stayed down. It was demanding physically and mentally, but they were up to the task, and even Kosar had sensed a change in the Shantasi. Whereas before they had been resigned to defeat, they had now started to believe they stood a chance.

The machines and their Krote riders changed that. They stormed in from the north, still fending off a few rogue tumblers that had managed to avoid destruction, and when they hit the first lines of Shantasi they cut the warriors down almost without breaking their pace. The tumblers rolled at the machines and bounced away again. Shantasi darted left and right, using Pace to try to keep out of reach. And the lead machines drove on, bypassing the first of the Shantasi to fight those farther uphill.

When the first machines reached the last line of defense they turned around and started battling their way back down.

Their lines shattered, the Shantasi took on the machines in a free-for-all that had only one possible outcome.

Kosar and Lucien emerged from behind their sheltering rock and entered into the fray. Down the slope to their left, a small machine lay on its side, several legs torn away by Shantasi slideshocks. The Krote still sat astride his mount’s back, and its remaining limbs whipped at the air, decapitating one woman and slicing a man across the thighs. A warrior drew an arrow against the Krote, but a fist-sized chunk of metal flew from the machine and crushed his chest before he could fire. He fell, the bow and arrow trapped beneath him.

“I’ll go for that!” Kosar said, pointing. “You try to keep this bastard thing distracted.” Without waiting for a reply, Kosar ran. He kept low, skirting far around the machine to keep out of range of its limbs. He checked left and right, making sure that no other Krote was closing on him. If that happened he would have little hope; he did not even have the Shantasi Pace to enable him to outrun some of the machines. He clutched A’Meer’s sword and wished she were here with him.
Stop thinking and start fighting,
she would say. So he ran, attention focused on the fallen Shantasi with the bow and arrows.

Behind him, he heard Lucien roar. He did not turn to see why.

He reached the fallen man and tugged the bow from his grasp, trying not to look at the ruin of his chest. Then he rolled the body onto its side and grabbed a handful of arrows from the quiver. The man let out a groan.

Kosar fell back and pushed himself away, shouting out in surprise.

He sensed the Krote’s attention move on to him. He ducked just in time to avoid being struck across the head by one of the machine’s spinning limbs. He rolled backward, rolled again and came up into a kneeling position.

Lucien was hacking his way closer to the machine. A limb struck him on the arm and knocked him sideways, but he stood again and swung his sword. It met a metal whip and sparks flew.

Kosar strung an arrow and aimed at the Krote. The Krote turned back to him and raised his hand, fisted and pointing at Kosar.

Crossbow on his wrist,
Kosar thought, but he could not let it upset his aim. He took a deep breath, let it out and loosed the arrow.

The Krote’s bolt scored his cheek as Kosar’s arrow found its mark. The Krote fell back, dying, and the machine paused in its fight, slumping down onto its belly as if relieved of a burden.

Lucien grinned at Kosar, his red face lit by fires springing up across the hillside. Kosar smiled back and breathed deeply. He could smell the fleshy fuel of those flames.

The Monk backed away from the machine and came to Kosar’s side. “Where now?” he said.

There were fights all around them. Up the slope Kosar saw a group of Shantasi harrying a machine while another warrior closed in from behind. She carried something in her arms—it looked like a rock—and she dodged several of the machine’s flailing limbs to place it against the construct’s side. The Shantasi turned and fled, leaving the Krote swinging his sword and raging at their cowardice.

The rock came to life. It glowed, like molten stone, and quickly ate its way into the machine, spitting a hail of bloody stone dust above it. The Krote looked down just as his ride reared up, and as it fell on its side the Krote was trapped beneath its stiffening limbs. Three Shantasi darted in and finished the Mages’ warrior, and the glowing stone ate its way fully inside the stricken machine.

“A young grinder,” Lucien said. “I wonder how they took it from its parent.”

“O’Lam said there was more, but not much.” The darting shapes of Shantasi using Pace caused smoke to swirl and eddy across the hillside. Another explosion blossomed around a machine as a swarm of flies was ignited. A yellow wolf—Kosar had heard of the pallid wolves, but never seen them—loped across the hill and leapt at a Krote astride a machine, spitting acid and showering her with venomous blood as the machine sliced the creature in two. The Krote screamed and died on her mount as it ran rogue.

He thought of Trey, Hope and Alishia, and closed his eyes in a brief plea to the Black.
Let them be all right.

Someone screamed close by, a long, loud wail that ended suddenly with the sound of metal cleaving meat. Kosar did not look for the source of the cry. “It’s hopeless,” he said.

“It always was,” Lucien said.

Around them, the battle played out across the lower slopes of darkest Kang Kang. Perhaps the mountains watched and smiled, enjoying the fresh blood spilled and sucked down into its soil. There could have been eyes on its higher slopes observing the explosions, ears listening to the screams of dying men and women, noses breathing in the stench of blood and soil, cooking meat and insides. Or maybe they had no awareness of the fight at all; the most important battle for three hundred years, meaningless to a range of mountains that defied eternity.

A group of Shantasi joined Kosar and Lucien, several experienced archers among them, and they set on a machine. The Shantasi used their Pace to distract the Krote, while the archers drew a line and brought him down with arrows to the chest and back. The Krote slumped over and shouted, giving his machine one final order, which it obeyed without hesitation. The resulting blue-flamed explosion, fueled by dark magic, melted everything it touched.

Lucien grasped Kosar’s arm and pulled him down behind a dead man, falling on him and screaming as the blue fire rolled overhead.

As the explosion subsided it was replaced by the screams of the injured. Kosar shoved Lucien from him and stood. The Monk sat up slowly, shaking, and then Kosar saw his back. The red robe had been burned away, along with much of his skin and flesh. The white of bones was visible here and there, pale and stark in the moonlight. No blood; the wounds were already cauterized.

“Lucien…”

“I can fight!” the Monk spat. He stood, screamed and ran at a machine coming their way, brandishing his sword, ducking at the last moment and hacking at one of the machine’s thick legs.

Kosar went to fight with him. Any moment could be his last, and soon one moment would. But he was enraged now, encouraged by Lucien’s strength, inspired by the ferocious Shantasi fighting and dying all around. And just when things became hopeless, the land rose up one more time.

THE SOLDIERS EMERGED
from the ground. Three of them to start with, manifesting as blank, black shadows, flexing to form individual features, taking in moonlight and giving out a sense of power that sent a chill down Kosar’s sweaty back.

“Mimics,” he whispered, thinking of the last time he had seen them. They had changed his course of action, encouraging him not to flee and leave the fate of Trey, Alishia and Hope to chance. Now they were here again, and he could hope once more.

“Lucien, step aside!” he shouted. The Red Monk glanced back, saw what was forming out of the ground and moved away from the machine. A Krote stood on its back, a battle-axe held in both hands, mouth open in a challenging shout. When she saw the new soldiers, her jaw fell, and she brandished the axe at them.

She sees a true enemy,
Kosar thought.
And she’s scared.

The mimics flowed at the machine. The construct formed a massive scythe from a molten limb and swung, but the weapon passed through the mimics with a splash, and they went on as though untouched. When they reached the machine’s hips they melted, poured upward and re-formed on its back.

The Krote faced up to the three strange soldiers, and though there was defiance on her face, Kosar saw that she was already prepared for defeat.

The mimics pressed in, merging with her so that she looked like a freak with three half brothers. When they came away, the Krote’s face and chest disintegrated into a flow of dissolving flesh.

More shadows were rising. The ground was crawling around Kosar’s feet, every speck shifting in a different direction. He felt dislocated. He looked at Lucien to gather his bearings and the Red Monk was swaying, hood still sheltering his face. Kosar walked to him, glancing down to see mimics part around each footfall. He nudged the Monk.

“Lucien!”

The Monk looked up. His face was red, eyes glowing with some inner light that Kosar had no wish to dwell upon. What anger, to produce such a look. What
rage.

“Let’s go,” Kosar said. “This can’t be happening everywhere, and others will need our help.”

They started making their way out from the forest of shadow soldiers. The mimicked soldiers did not walk, they
flowed,
moving over grass, stones and bodies. And whatever unfathomable minds worked inside these things were focused on one thing: finding Krotes and killing them.

A mimic shape rose beside Kosar, forming faster than any he had yet seen, and he recognized its face. It was O’Lam, her features altered by the vicious impact of the spinning disc that had killed her. Kosar paused while the mimic moved off, then looked around until he spied the body of the dead Shantasi. He went to her, knelt and touched the back of the woman’s shattered skull, and closed his eyes to offer a brief chant. He had only ever chanted a wraith down once before.

“There’s no time for that,” Lucien said.

“You leave me to do what I have to do!” Kosar replied, angry that the Monk had intervened. “We need a Mourner here.”

“And if there’s any victory in the next few hours, we’ll get many. In the meantime, it’s those that are still alive we should be helping, not the lost wraiths of those growing cold.”

“You’re all heart.”

“I’m a Red Monk.”

They moved on together, and mimic soldiers
hushed
past them whenever another machine was spied. They passed one construct sprouting half a body where a Krote was melting away. The machine itself was under attack as well, bindings tearing, the arcane building blocks of its form failing. Limbs fell, stone disintegrated and brief fires erupted at its heart until the mimics starved the flames of air. Not only was this a slaughter, it was a very precise, clean slaughter. For some reason that made Kosar uneasy.