Dusk (50 page)

Lenora stepped back several paces. Her eyes widened, her heart skipped a few beats, and the many wounds on her exposed skin tingled with something approaching excitement.
This is when we see,
she thought.
This is when they really show us what they can do. Already they’ve touched the sky. Now it’s the turn of the ground.

The Mages began to rise from their knees to their feet, hands maintaining contact with the ground as though stuck there, and then slowly they straightened their backs, lifting their hands and seemingly bringing part of the ground with them.

Light burned into the dusk, and each of the Mages’ hands was lifting a column of fluid stone. The ground vibrated as the Mages’ actions upset the balance of the land. Rock growled and crumbled, and strange rainbows were cast in the dust clogging the atmosphere. Angel laughed, and S’Hivez’s muttering became louder, the words revealing themselves as something much less complex than a spell.
It’s all coming back,
he said, again and again. His voice ground stone together, and then the two Mages turned to face each other and began to work their hands.

Lenora could feel the heat from the molten rock from where she stood, and she saw other Krotes stepping back as their skin stretched and reddened. The Mages began to mold it, twisting their hands here and there, moving their arms through impossible angles, pushing and pulling, prodding with stiffened fingers and picking with long nails, smoothing with palms and nudging with the heels of their hands. And between them something began to take shape. Sharp edges appeared from nowhere; curves hardened; a globe of rock rose up on thin stony stilts. Angel laughed again, and Lenora shivered.

The Mages stepped away from each other, allowing the rock room to move and grow. More flowed from the ground, urged by a simple gesture from S’Hivez, and they molded this around the form already there, thickening the trunk and lengthening limbs. They added more, and more again, and then S’Hivez stepped back and lowered his hands.

He looks tired,
Lenora thought.
They have this, they have their twisted magic, but they’re not used to using it.
S’Hivez looked at her through the heat haze, and she saw the black pits of his eyes. He scowled. She looked away, her skin crawling, scalp tightening as if the old wound there were about to reopen and spill her treacherous brain to the ground. A thought came, and she could do nothing to hold it back:
He can hear me.
She did not look at the old Shantasi Mystic to see whether this was true.

“Lenora!” Angel called. “A present for you, and it will be ready soon.” She threw a punch at the sea and a huge splash rose in the twilight, glowing silver and yellow in the moons’ contrasting light. Krotes ducked down as the wave crashed against the harbor wall, tumbling over and rumbling across the ground until it broke around the glowing sculpture.

The stone hissed as its superheated framework was suddenly cooled. There were cracks and explosions, and the sounds that came from the thing were almost those of something alive. And if it did have life, it was in pain.

Lenora could not hold back her own accompanying shout.

As the hissing steam died away, Angel appeared by her side. She leaned close to Lenora, and her breath was as warm as the stone she had just cooled. “It’s yours,” she said. “Your machine, your ride, and soon I’ll give it a life.” She turned away from Lenora and surveyed the assembled Krotes. “You’ll
all
have one!” she said. “Machines of war for you to do what you’ve always been ready to do: take Noreela. Soon the ships will be here, and your fellow Krotes will follow you east and south and west. I name every one of you here a captain, and Lenora is now your Mistress. You answer to her, and she will answer to us. And the rewards at the end of this short war will be beyond imagining.” She turned back to Lenora and smiled. “I’m giving you my army,” she said, “and I ask that you use it well. I know your intentions, Lenora. I know your aims. I know what you hear and what speaks to you, but I ask that you ignore that calling until you have fulfilled your purpose. You’re here for me, and because of me.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Lenora whispered.
Not long to wait,
she thought. And she hoped that the shade of her dead child heard the promise in those words.

“And now . . . life for your war machine.” Angel walked back to the fallen hawk with the dead boy on its back. “Oh, S’Hivez,” she said, laughing, “even
you
must appreciate the symbolism of this!”

The Mage laid one hand on the hawk and the other on the dead farm boy’s arm. Beneath her hands the flesh of both began to shimmer and ripple, and soon the stench of cooking meat once again permeated the air across Conbarma. She moved back slowly, melted flesh sticking to her hands and flowing like thick honey, and then swivelled and thrust her hands at the stone sculpture.

Flesh flowed. Blood misted the air and moved as if blown by a strong wind. Bones cracked and ruptured, spinning through the air and impacting the rock, delving their way inside and crackling again as they fused back together. The flesh of the boy and the hawk melded and filled out the fighting machine, flooding hollows within its rocky construct and then building layer upon layer across its outside. Blood greased its joints. The dead hawk shrank as more of its flesh was scoured away, and the boy’s corpse came apart.

Angel lowered her hands and stepped back. Lenora saw that she was panting slightly, her shoulders stooped just a little too much, and she wondered again at how much this new magic was draining the Mages. But then Angel turned and looked at her, and behind her smile Lenora saw a strength she had never witnessed before. Not just physical strength—Angel had always been strong—but strength of purpose. There was no doubt in Angel, and no fear. She was unstoppable.

“Here it is,” Angel said. She pointed back at the machine. “And here you are.”

Lenora fell to her knees. She clasped her hands to her head and pressed, trying to squeeze out the thing she felt inside, the living,
squirming
thing. She was suddenly intimately aware of the life that had just been created, and even as she felt Angel’s calming touch and heard her soothing words, she knew that this was not something that was ever meant to be.

Take care,
Angel whispered in her mind,
you’re strong, Lenora, and this is feeble and weak—a machine, a tool for you to command and use. It lives like an animal down a hole, not like a proud Krote come to conquer and claim. Its life is less than a hawk’s shit, but you and it are linked now by this touch.
And Angel left her mind, leaving that link in place.

Lenora gasped and went to fall forward, but Angel was at her side with a helping hand. The Mage helped her to stand and then leaned in close, whispering once again: “You need to be strong.” It was a command, not a request.

Lenora nodded, took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She was looking directly at the machine where it stood motionless and awaiting her touch. “I saw you,” she whispered, “and I control you.” There was no answer, but she sensed the shade of this thing drawing back in fear.

The machine moved for the first time.

The Krotes gathered across the harbor gasped.
This is the first time they’ve really seen magic,
Lenora thought. She was the only one here, other than the Mages, who had been alive during the Cataclysmic War. These other Krotes were descendants of those who had fled Noreela three hundred years before, the blood flowing in their veins merged with that of the primitive tribes they had found on Dana’Man and the smaller islands to the east and west of that frozen wasteland. They were fighters, warriors, true to the Mages and faithful in their pledges. But they had only ever heard of magic, never seen it.

Lenora looked around at her captains and saw their fear. She realized that this was a defining moment, not only in her relationship with the Mages, but in the history of the land itself. Everything had changed when the Mages caught the boy, took his magic and stripped his soul, and now that change was about to be expanded to envelop the whole of Noreela. Anything she did now would dictate her own part in that change, and what would follow.

Lenora walked forward, approaching what she perceived to be the front of this new machine. As she drew closer she saw that it had a face. She closed her eyes, still walking, and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, the machine was staring at her.

It had several eyes, placed at various points around its bulbous head. Two of them were watching her. It was too dark to see their color, but she knew that they were not the eyes of a hawk. She lifted her chin and glared back.

The machine lowered itself, stone underside settling on the ground, and Lenora stepped up onto its back.

It had mouths too, and a nose, and other strange protrusions that could have been ears or organs to serve more murky senses. It stank of something more elemental than scorched flesh. It smelled, Lenora realized, of magic.

She sat astride the new machine’s back and rested her hands on two bony protuberances either side of its head.
Stand,
she thought, and the machine raised itself on several stone legs. It shook beneath her, the vibrations travelling up her thighs and into her stomach. It gave a strange sexual quality to her fear, and caused her old wounds to ache as if craving the knife, the blade, the arrow once again.
Walk,
she thought, and the machine took its first hesitant steps. They were strong. Its shaking stopped, but she could feel its inner workings throbbing beneath her: no heartbeat, but something that felt like a fire being stoked; no breathing, but gasps as gas was blown out and air sucked in.
Turn,
she thought, and the machine stood at the edge of the harbor, a pace away from tumbling into the water, and turned to face her Krotes.

The Mages watched. Even S’Hivez appeared to be smiling.

Lenora sensed the power at work beneath her. This was not just a thing of stone and flesh and blood, it was also imbued with the Mages’ magic, awash with a deadly potential that she had yet to realize. She wondered what it would do when she sent further commands, and the possibilities were thrilling.
Give fire,
she thought, and a ball of flame formed from one of the machine’s mouths. She held it there, its roaring echoed by the gasps from the assembled warriors. Then she turned and flung the fire far out over the sea, watching it arc down and then splash into the water. It seemed to burn even as it sank, and for a few seconds the whole harbor’s surface glowed from beneath.

My gods,
she thought,
what have you created?

Lenora turned the machine around and stood on its back, two body-heights above the ground and elevated so that she could see right across Conbarma’s waterfront. All the surviving Krotes were here now—almost fifty of them—and the Mages, and they were all watching her. She felt the power in that, and smiled.

Angel smiled back.

“There’s work to be done!” she cried. “More machines to be built by our Masters. More preparations to make. The sun has fled our Mages’ power, scared and cowardly, and the twilight it’s left behind will be filled with the death-cries of Noreela. This is your time, Krotes, the time you have lived for from the moment you were born.” She paused, looked down at the head of the machine with its mad eyes and slavering mouths. “I once saw the shores of Noreela awash with blood, and that memory has always been bitter, because the blood was my own. Now it’s time to stain the land again, but this time with other blood. Noreela will fall, there’s no doubt of that. It’s the manner of that fall I so look forward to seeing.”

More fire,
she thought, and the machine formed several balls of fire and sent them hovering above the heads of the Krotes. “Krotes!” she shouted.

The warriors screeched in response. They stared at the machine and raised their hands, and she saw the fire reflected in their eyes. She walked the thing among them, letting them reach out and touch its cool stone and cooler flesh. The fires faded out, but in the twilight they could all see and feel this thing which, when multiplied, would help them win the war.

Lenora smiled at Angel and S’Hivez, and she saw that they were pleased.