Tim Lebbon - Dawn

It formed so quickly that it was fully there before he had time to truly comprehend what he was seeing.

A’Meer stood before him. But this was not A’Meer as he had ever seen her. There was no smile on her pale face, no mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes, no sign that she saw or heard or recognized anything. The mimics had formed her upright, but this A’Meer was dead. Kosar had no doubt about that: her legs were gashed, her stomach and chest a mess of protruding flesh and bone, her throat gaping like a screaming mouth. Even her head was cleaved down to between her eyes. He could see her shattered skull and exposed brain. The mimics were meticulous in their detail. This was A’Meer as they had last seen her, lying dead back in the Gray Woods while he was probably still running up the slope to the machines’ graveyard. They had seen blood pulsing from her throat, and they copied that action now. They had seen her right eye ruptured and leaking onto her cheek, and that image repeated itself here. She was dead, his beloved A’Meer…and yet her mouth moved, as though she were trying to inhale one last time, or expel one final word.

“A’Meer,” Kosar whispered, though he knew it was not her. Still, seeing that image, her death hit home like never before, and Kosar started crying. Tears blurred the vision, and then the scene distorted some more as A’Meer came apart before him-flesh flowing, bone melting away-and sank back into the uniform mass of mimics shifting across the ground.

Kosar tried talking to them, asking what they wanted and why they had shown him this, but the mimics suddenly flowed to the east as fast as a man could run. The movement upset his senses and sent him tumbling to his left. He fell, rolled, and when he looked down, the ground was itself again. The mimics whispered away.

“A’Meer,” he said again, but no more thoughts were spoken in her voice.

Yet as the impact of viewing her death hit home, Kosar began to wonder what message the mimics had been trying to convey. By showing him a vision of A’Meer, what could they possibly have been trying to communicate? And why?

Before, they had revealed themselves to Rafe, the carrier of the land’s new magic. But he was simply Kosar. He did not understand. He could not attribute intelligence to such small things. Hive organisms, Hope had called them, their whole effect the sum of their parts. They had shown him A’Meer, dead and bleeding, her mouth working at the air…

“Final words?” he said. “Final wish?” Or perhaps the mimics themselves had manipulated her image for their own ends.

The darkness seemed deeper than before, and more filled with unknown things. Kosar had never been too proud to admit fear, and he was scared now-more of the things he did not know than of the things he did. Rafe’s marking by magic and his subsequent loss must have affected the land far deeper than Kosar could have imagined. The mimics’ appearance, and the fact that they seemed to be offering help, was as disturbing as it was shocking. He had never even heard of their existence before a few days ago. Now they were trying to send him a message.

What else could be stirring across the land?

He stared into the distance, and suddenly the blank twilight offered him a revelation: the mimics had cause to deal with him! Rafe was dead and gone, and yet they still bothered with a cowardly thief fleeing something he did not understand.

Something hecould not understand.

They still had cause to appear to him!

He started running back the way he had come. He had been gone for an hour, maybe two, and he hoped that they were still there. Don’t be gone, he thought. We need to talk. In the name of the Black, we need to talk now more than ever before!

Stomach aching from his bout of vomiting, hand still giving him pain, Kosar ran once again, feeling the weight of Noreela falling heavier on his shoulders the closer he came to the fallen machine.

THE OTHERS WERE gone. The space between the shattered ribs was devoid of life, as though the machine had stood here for a thousand years and its insides had long since rotted away. Kosar stood panting, just outside the circumference of ribs, staring at the emptiness within.

Gone! He had come unerringly back, navigating through the twilight by instinct alone. It had only taken him half an hour at most, but in that time Hope, Trey and Alishia had left, abandoning this site of Kosar’s betrayal and heading south for Kang Kang. He looked in that direction and saw its peaks on the horizon, low and distant and yet menacing even from here.

“Mage shit!” Kosar thumped a rib with the heel of one hand and it crumbled, sending creamy shards to the ground. So strong before, now so weak; he was amazed that magic could change so much. He circled the machine, trailing his hand along the ribs and the hardened skin that still hung between some of them, thinking about the short time this thing had been aloft and what it had been trying to achieve. At first it had simply moved them away from the danger: the Monks, the fighting machines, the Mages and their Krote warrior. But after that, when the danger had seemingly passed, it had turned south and continued on that course, so definite in its direction that it must have been intentional. Rafe had said that he needed to go to Kang Kang, and Kosar had assumed it was so he could hide. But perhaps there was something else. Maybe he was missing the simple truth, too eager to let fear and confusion cloud his judgment.

Now Alishia wanted to go to Kang Kang as well.

Kosar hung his head and tried to catch his breath. He was no longer a young man, and lately he had been doing a lot of running. Running, and fighting-and every waking second spent with those Red Monks trying to kill them. At the time fear had driven him on, but now that he’d had time to pause and reflect, his muscles had stiffened, his legs turned to planks of useless wood. He closed his eyes and kneaded his thighs, hissing with the pain.

“Damn you, Hope. Damn you, Trey.”

“Damnyou, Kosar!”

A blade settled on Kosar’s right shoulder and pressed to the side of his neck. He felt the tension in the blade, wound and ready to spin. “Trey!”

“Why have you come back?”

“I need to talk to you and Hope. I saw something-”

“You didn’t want to talk earlier.”

Kosar pushed the disc-sword from his shoulder and turned. “I wasn’t ready then,” he said. Trey was staring at him, and the fledger’s face was yellow as the death moon. “What’s wrong, Trey?”

Trey smiled. Then he leaned forward, laughter buzzing through him rather than bursting out. He was too tired to laugh properly. He stood after a while and wiped moisture from his eyes. The smile was a grimace now, and his shaking had turned into a shiver he could barely control. “What’s wrong, Kosar, is that the Mages have won. I’m starting into the fledge rage, which may last for days or even longer, and I’m nowhere near any fledge mine that I know of. It could well kill me in the end. You ran, and we thought you were gone for good, saving your own skin and leaving us out here in the dark. Alishia walked for a while, but then she collapsed, shouting about burning books and truth turning to ash, and I haven’t been able to wake her since. Hope is with her now…and Hope has her own reasons for being here, so I don’t trust her for a moment. I can still hear my mother’s cry. I can still smell Sonda’s blood, spilled underground. I can feel the Nax in my mind. And you ask me what’s wrong?”

Kosar reached out, then dropped his hands again. Trey stepped forward and rested his head on the thief’s shoulder, weeping, his thin arms snaking around Kosar’s back and hugging him tight.

Kosar closed his eyes and felt the fledger’s anger and hate and fear flowing into him, soaking his shoulder with tears, feeding his flesh with heat, filling his mind with a bitter shame that he thought might never go away. It was almost as bad as being in those Gray Woods again, having those things feeding on his darkest secrets and dragging them up for contemplation. Almost as bad. But not quite. Because Trey was a friend, and even though Kosar had abandoned him, now he had returned. Kosar hugged Trey, and realized that strength such as this went both ways.