Tim Lebbon: Dawn

Kosar looked to the east again. He felt the fledgling heat of the sun on his skin, and it was like dipping into a warm bath. Wisps of fine cloud scratched the sky red. It was the most beautiful thing Kosar had ever seen.

“You’ve lost,” he said. “Your filthy Mages are dead, and you’ve fuckinglost!”

“So magic me away,” the Krote said. But Kosar could see the strange look in her eyes-part confusion, part relief-and when he raised his sword again she merely glanced at it before turning away.

A hundred mimic soldiers melted back into the ground. The surface flowed northward, down the slopes of the battlefield and out onto the long plains that led toward whatever was left of Noreela. Kosar mourned their passing, but he realized that their purpose was fulfilled. What happened to the few hundred remaining Shantasi, and their Krote enemies, was of no concern to the mimics.

“Going home?” Kosar shouted after his enemy. “Fleeing again?”

The Krote turned and stared at him, and Kosar began to regret his words. “I have more things left to do,” she said. She gazed around the field of battle, the piles of bodies, the shambling dead and weary living, the Krotes and machines, the Shantasi cheering here, regrouping there, all of it now lit by the sun rising triumphant. “Do what you will. My time is moving on.” She mounted her machine and sent it a command.

Kosar screamed at the Krote, “I made you fall!” She glanced at him again, dismissive, then rode away. He threw A’Meer’s sword. Its bloodied blade glowed red in the sunlight as it spun at the Krote woman’s head. It hit her neck and bounced off, rattling from the back of the machine and dropping beneath its stone legs. She did not even turn around. The machine stomped on the sword and moved on.

As the Krote and her machine seemed to shimmer away down the hillside, Kosar realized that he was crying.

KOSAR PICKED UP his sword, amazed to find it undamaged even by that monster’s weight. Unlike Lucien. He felt little at the death of the Monk; no sadness, and certainly no delight. Lucien had killed A’Meer, but her murderer had been a Red Monk, not a man. Perhaps sometime in the future Kosar would have time to dwell upon what that meant.

He went to war again. With sunlight flooding the hillside-its heat and rays fresh and energizing-the fight became that much easier. The Shantasi used the confusion of dawn to regroup and change tactics, forming into four large circles, fighting their way up the slope. There were more pallid wolves to send against the Krotes, and a dozen young grinders were attached to machines confused by the dawn. They chewed and melted their way through stone and metal alike, eating out the hearts of these unnatural constructs.

The Mages’ warriors lost something as day dawned. Whether it was a true sense of purpose or the confidence of victory, their fighting became less effective. Conversely, the Shantasi had gained so much more. These were the inhabitants of New Shanti that had refused to flee. These were the warriors and farmers, the poets and carpenters who had taken up arms against the aggressor, instead of following their Elder Mystics’ lead and accepting defeat. It was confidence that fueled them now, and perhaps a hint of pride in knowing what they had already achieved. Both gave them strength and grace.

In between attacks, the Shantasi glanced skyward and smiled. The warm sun-free of Kang Kang now, and rising confidently above Noreela once more-smiled back.

There were no more serpenthals to aid their fight. The surviving tumblers had also disappeared from the battle, rumbling east and west along the mountain range. Many remained on the plains, the smoke of their pyres forming a dirty brown cloud that drifted slowly to the east.

It quickly became apparent to the Krote army that this was not their hour. Some of them turned and fled back to the north. Others dropped their weapons and stepped forward to surrender, a sense of weary relief on their faces. They were cut down by the Shantasi. This was not a battle where mercy held much meaning.

Kosar fought on. And hours later, as the sun peaked and scorched any remaining shadows of dusk from the land, he felt an urgent calling from the south. Alishia, he thought. Trey. Hope. He had been away from his friends for too long. He needed to know whether any of them were still alive.

HOPE WAS WHISPERING to the ground.

The words she used were old, and to many in Noreela they would have no meaning. But she came from a long line of witches, both true and false, and a witch could never forget the language of the land.

She spoke to the soil, stroked the grass, glanced up at the sky yet again to see where the darkness was being eaten away by the sun. She buried her fingers in the soft ground and touched the roots of the grass. She felt things down there caressing her fingertips, cold and old.

Her tattoos widened across her face as her mouth fell open, and suddenly she knew.

She rubbed her hands together and pooled magic in her palms. She laughed, sniffed her fingertips and smelled way past the soil, down to the depths of magic and what it could do, what itwould do. And she realized just how blinkered the Mages had always been.

When she stood, she knew that they would be close. The female Mage was tall and thin and beautiful, but such beauty remained far from her eyes. The male was still ruined from the fire. In the sudden daylight, his scorched black wounds were grotesque, but his eyes were bright and undamaged, glittering orange as though still filled with the fire that should have killed him.

“Hello,” Hope said. She laughed again, and it felt good.

“I know you,” the male Mage growled.

“I don’t think so,” Hope said. “I’ve fucked a lot of people in my time, and I’m sure I’d have remembered someone as ugly as you.” She was completely unafraid, even though she knew that this would end in her death. Her life might stop here, but it was complete, fulfilled, and she felt the true blood of her ancestors coursing through her veins for the first time. I could heal his burns, she thought. I could see her future, I could cast myself from the here and now, pass through the land and arrive wherever I wished. I could do all that and so many other things, but the first is something I owe. And I owe so much to so many.

“You mock us?” Angel asked.

“Mockery is no answer to evil,” Hope said.

Angel spat. “Isee you! You’ve got evil hiding in you, just as surely as you have those markings on your face. Shall I pull them? Rip them out to see what they drag from your depths?”

“I can live with my own wrongdoings,” Hope said. “But don’t you see what else I have?”

“You’re a witch,” S’Hivez said.

Hope nodded.

“A witch,” Angel said. “How cute.”

“You’ve lost,” Hope said.

Angel frowned and S’Hivez glanced at the sky.

“A brief setback,” Angel said.

“No,” Hope said, shaking her head. “You’velost. And you never even knew how to win. You ply your bastardized magic, but true magic is the language of the land. You never knew how to listen to it. And you willnever speak it.”

“And you, a sad old witch with no magic, can say this?”

“Oh I have magic,” Hope said quietly, and she muttered words from ancient memory.

The ground below the Mages split open. They shouted in surprise as they fell, trying to cast some dark spell at Hope that fizzled to nothing. Angel coughed a blue fireball that sputtered out beneath the strengthening sun. S’Hivez threw a shock wave that parted around the witch and killed trees, flattened grass. Hope muttered a backward phrase and the shock wave reversed, slamming into S’Hivez, knocking him back, and behind her trees came back to life and grass stood up.