Dusk (13 page)

“Hey,” she said, not expecting an answer. The fledger did not stir.

Alishia returned to her horse and pulled a water gourd from the saddlebag. She would need to find a stream to replenish it soon, but for now there was enough to give the fledger a drink and take some herself. He seemed in a bad way. She was no nurse, but at least she could bathe and clean his wounds. As she knelt down next to the wounded man, he grabbed her wrists.

“They’re out!” he hissed. “They’re awake!”

Alishia started, but his grip prevented her from backing away. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, teeth bared, pain clear on his face and evident in his voice. He let go of her at last and started moaning.

“It’s all right,” she said, leaning forward again, tipping a splash of water into her palm. She had read many books about the fledge mines and those that mined them, and she had great respect for the way they had continued following the Cataclysmic War, machineless. In the dark, miles down, they used touch as well as sound to communicate.

She dripped water into his mouth, shaded his eyes, touched his forehead and cheek and the underside of his nose as she tried to calm him down. With each utterance she would gently stroke the skin of his face. She knew the method, not the language, and for all she knew she could be abusing the memory of his ancestors while trying to soothe him. But eventually it seemed to work, and the suffering man did not object when she draped one of her spare dresses across his face to shield it from the sun.

“The sun’s very high, it’s midday,” she said. “I know your eyes will be sensitive. Keep that there. I need to clean your wounds. I’ll keep talking as I move around so you know where I am. You’re safe, though, fledger. Whatever you were fleeing, it’s gone now.”

“They’ll never be gone,” he said, but Alishia did not reply. Serious discussion would be for later. Right now she simply needed to keep him awake.

While she worked, pulling back his shirt and bathing the cuts and scrapes across his skin, trying to ease the sunburn where his flesh lay exposed and reddened, she talked about things she knew. She started with fledge mining and how it had changed through history. Sometimes he snorted, other times he seemed entranced. She moved onto other things, random facts hauled from her memory, until the legend of the Violet Dogs seemed to grab his interest. There were songs, she said, although she could not sing. Ro Sargossa had written poems about the myth, but she could never do them justice.

“Where were they from?” the fledger asked.

“Beyond Noreela.”

“What’s beyond Noreela?”

“Sea. More sea. Whirlpools. Ice. Islands, some say, even big islands, with wild people and savage animals living on them. We’re the center of things, and beyond Noreela is the rough edge. That’s where the two Mages and their army fled to after the Cataclysmic War.”

“Something’s happening up here,” the miner said, wincing as Alishia caught a flap of loose skin over one deep cut.

“What do you mean?”

“Something bad, something threatening. The Nax know it. They’re awake! They killed Sonda, they took the whole cavern. They’re awake and angry!”

“You’re safe now,” she said, distracted. She glanced at his bloodied sword again. “Is that what you killed with your weapon?”

The fledger laughed and it was a sickly sound, like someone gargling with vomit. “The Nax! With a disc-sword? You have no idea, topsider.”

They remained silent for a while, Alishia tending his wounds and the miner letting out the occasional grunt or grateful sigh.

“I’m Trey,” he said at last. “Trey Barossa. This is my first time topside. My mother died in there. So did everyone else.”

“I’m Alishia. I’m sorry about your mother.”

“I have to tell someone, have to reach someone who can help.”

“Like who? The Duke? No one’s seen him for years.”

Trey frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “Are there militia? Authorities who should know, those who protect Noreela?” He opened his eyes slightly, and Alishia saw the tears. They were not only from the pain of sunlight hitting his yellowed eyes for the first time.

“You have very beautiful eyes,” she said, unable to help herself.

“I’m sorry,” Trey said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize you were a little girl.”

“I’m not! I just—”

“Sorry,” the miner said again, sitting up, holding his head in his hands and letting tears darken the ground between his knees. “But is there no one we can go to? There are hundreds of dead people down there, and the Nax will spread beneath the mountains. We have to tell the other mines. There are thousands of people living beneath these mountains alone. You know there’s a whole world down there, Alishia. The Nax can destroy it. We’ve known that forever, but forever they’ve kept quiet. Now they’ve been woken.”

“Woken by what?”

Trey grasped his knees and squeezed, as if trying to wring out the truth. “By whatever’s happening up here. Anything that wakes them up means bad times falling on us, always. Just never
this
bad. In the past, there was only ever one at a time . . .” He trailed off, tracing the pattern of his tears on the dry grass, as if communicating through the language of the mines as he spoke. “Sonda,” he whispered. “Mother.”

Alishia rigged a sun screen with her blanket and some broken branches from a nearby tree, and went about preparing some food. Trey remained awake and silent. Occasionally she heard a sob from him, but she left him to his mourning, traveling some way along the slope as she searched for wild potatoes.

What she had read about the Nax had always been written as myth, grand and great stories with which to frighten children or startle susceptible adults. She had never read a serious book where there was anything more than a passing reference, supposition dressed as fact, and she had always assumed that the Nax were mostly make-believe. But then, many people believed that the Violet Dogs were imaginary as well, a dread tale of invasion and slaughter dreamed up generations ago to fulfill some political or religious agenda.

“I thought the Nax were a legend,” she said quietly as she approached Trey. She dropped an armful of wild potatoes and began chopping them into a bowl with a pinch of herbs.

“They are,” he said. “They were. Everyone down there believes in them, but there’s little proof, little to tell the truth. Moments in history, but history is easily distorted. They’re our gods and our demons.”

“All gods and demons make themselves heard or felt from time to time,” Alishia said. She cursed inwardly, stunned at her clumsiness in conversation. This poor man was mourning his mother’s death, and the deaths of those he knew and loved, and here she was spouting her naïve librarian’s philosophy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean—”

“No,” he said. He was looking at her properly for the first time now, holding the blanket above his eyes to shield them from the sun. “That’s all right. I’m sorry I said you were a little girl. I can see that I was wrong.”

Alishia turned away, blushing. She felt so inept. She was not used to talking to people, especially strangers.

Especially fledge miners!

Trey Barossa ate little, and after food he thanked Alishia and said that he needed to sleep, to travel, to warn . . .

She watched confused and fascinated as the miner took a chunk of fledge from his shoulder bag and chewed it as his eyes closed, his breathing slowed and his body seemed to relax, molding itself to the ground. She sat nearby and looked back across the plains at Noreela City. It was still visible in the distance, a bruise on the land with a brown haze of smoke marking the sky above it. The city was less than a day distant, and yet it already felt a lifetime away.

Later she wandered over to the sleeping miner and gathered his things. His shoulder bag fell open. She caught sight of a lump of yellow fledge within.

Alishia looked back at the city again. More than a world away.

IT DID NOT
take long for Trey to drift away. He felt the heat of sunlight on his skin, even through the blanket the girl had erected above him, and he smelled a hundred smells he did not know, heard wind brushing through nearby trees, felt the cool smoothness of grass beneath him, a thousand experiences he had never known living underground where the air was cool, the cavern filled with man-made smells and the breeze came from deeper within the caves, bringing only rumor. He should be reveling in this place. There was so much to see, yet he had barely opened his eyes.

But sleep was welcoming for him, and the travel that came with it. He had to move his mind across mountains, try to touch the awareness of miners farther away, deeper down. He had to
warn
them.

The sounds and smells faded as sleep took him, and Trey rode the power of the fledge. He moved away quickly, shifting straight up into the air like a cave bat gone wild, flailing invisible limbs to try to regain a sense of balance. His mind spun, and with it his perceptions. Up and down ceased to exist. There was simply around: an all-encompassing awareness of being surrounded by space, unhindered by rock, a million different routes open to him from where he hung, unplanned, unrestricted. Trey’s mind exulted and rose higher, touching clouds that tingled his skin and made him shiver where he slept on the hillside far below. Shapes circled him for a while, black birds with cruel curved beaks, and he was aware that they had something of the talent he possessed. They knew of his presence, though they could not see him. They circled some more and Trey shifted away, watching as the birds dipped and rose, trying to find him again. They called out and he heard them twice, up here in his mind and down below with his sleeping man’s ears.

He felt more free and unimpeded than ever before in a fledge dream. The space around him was staggering, the potential overwhelming. He wished Sonda could have experienced this; he wished that they could have been here together. But Sonda was dead, slaughtered by the rampaging Nax.

Trey tried to rein in his mind and steer it across the mountains. He passed between peaks, dipped down to touch a tumbling stream that came from deep within the mountains, wondering whether it was connected with the underground river that had played the background to his life forever. He went farther from his body than he ever had before. The distance was frightening—he could feel the space between his conscious mind and his subconscious—but it also felt safe. It was no wonder, as his mother had once told him, that so many of the fledgers who visited topside decided to stay forever. Up here there was such
freedom.

He passed the cave and shaft in the hillside where the rising had brought him to the surface, raging and mad with grief, sending him out blind into this new world. The rising had halted in its tracks. Way down below, the mules were dead.

Trey moved on, eager to put distance between himself and that evidence of his former life. He flew into the mountains, passing a small lake speckled with signs of thousands of fish breaking the surface. A scar on one hillside told of a recent landslide, and the ground revealed below glowed and glittered, as if the blood of the land was drying in the sun.

Onward, farther into the Widow’s Peaks. On one steep slope he spied a herd of creatures rolling uphill. He moved closer and made out something of their makeup; they were like shifting plants, great balls of growth that hauled themselves effortlessly against the slope with barbs and hooks and sharps stems. Closer still, and then the whispering began. Deep down in his mind voices rose up, some in languages he could not understand, a few relating words he could. There were many whisperers, and although Trey was sure they were not actually directing their speech at him, he felt exposed and vulnerable floating high in the fresh mountain air. He went even closer and the voices grew louder. Their whispers were rhythmic and spellbinding, drawing him in. He tried to make out whether they were talking in pleasure or pain, glee or grief, and when he saw some of the shapes decorating the outsides of these tumbling things—the flash of bone, old cloth flapping as the things moved, the occasional damp darkness of rotting things—he realized whose voices they were.

He rose quickly, escaping this band of things as they tumbled inexorably uphill, and within minutes he was out of range of their muttering victims.

Trey flew on until he found what he was looking for; a wound in the land, a mine shaft, cauterized by time and continuous usage. There was no evidence of any sort of rising here. A huge machine sat dead and pointless way beyond the mouth of the shaft. Great chains, links as long as a man, lay rusted into the soil, mostly overgrown but visible here and there as a reminder of old times. They connected the redundant machine with whatever means had once been used to haul the mine’s product to the surface.

He dipped down, hovered at the mouth of the mine and took a mental sniff. It was fledge, but old, little sign of any new batches of the drug having been brought to the surface in a while. He drifted inside, immediately finding the going harder now that he was confined once again in tunnels and shafts. He stopped suddenly, his incorporeal self standing at the black entrance to some unfathomably deep pit.

Out of the darkness came silent screams.

Trey reeled, spun back, passing into rock and out again, his movements slowing, and for a few rapid heartbeats he was terrified that he was becoming stuck down there, caught in the sickening outpouring of pain and agony, trapped in the knowledge that slaughter was happening at that exact moment. The mental anguish poured up and out like an eruption of pure torment, scalding him where he lay.

Somehow Trey withdrew from the mine. He fled into the sunlight, letting its heat bathe the screams from his floating mind.

ALISHIA DRANK WINE
sometimes. Nothing else. She had certainly never tried fledge.

She knew of some who used it, and she was more than aware of its effects: nullifying, dulling, somnambulistic. In her readings about the fledge-mining communities that had existed for generations belowground, there were hints at its spiritualistic properties, the idea that its real use was as a perception-expanding compound more than as a mind-numbing drug. She had been drawn to the conclusion that its effect depended largely upon the user, what they desired from the drug and what drove them to sample it.