Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Fear, O’Gan knew, would be the Mages’ greatest ally. If they waited before venturing to New Shanti, her people would crumble and fall without lifting a weapon.

Perhaps it was like this all across Noreela. He hoped not.

He looked north, out over the misty Sordon Sound, and a great blackness seemed to hang there like a weight ready to fall. There was no telling what was happening right now in the north of Noreela. Most in Hess believed they were already at war, but they could not know for certain, and it was the not knowing that chilled O’Gan most of all. The Mystics had tried for much of the previous day, sniffing the Janne until the purple blossoms started to shrivel and fade, sitting spaced across the roof or huddled in warm groups, opening themselves to visions. But the world of their collective mind was blank. And perhaps it was this more than anything that had eventually driven them to flee.

Magic was a fickle thing, so one Elder had said. There was no knowing what it would do, or could do, nor how the Mages would handle it. The future was a mystery darker than the blackest night, and O’Gan wished for a sign that would give illumination to the dark.

He sat in the center of the Temple roof, searching the darkened heavens for hope. He closed his eyes and wished for a happy dream, but the cool breeze singing in across Sordon Sound offered only tales of woe.

“We can’t just give in,” he said. “We have tofight!”

And then the sign he had been hoping for finally arrived.

AT FIRST, O’GAN thought it was the breeze, blowing sand from the Mol’Steria Desert and dusting it against the side of the Temple. He closed his eyes tighter and hugged his legs to try to present less of a target for the incoming storm.

Then he realized that there was no breeze, and no sand pricked his skin.

Yet the sound continued. O’Gan kept his eyes closed, hoping that this was the beginning of a vision. He had not breathed Janne pollen for several hours, though sometimes visions would come as the effect of the pollen wore off. But this was sensory: he washearing the hiss of sand. His mind was devoid of vision as ever, and as he opened his eyes he saw the sign that he had been waiting for finally present itself.

A shadow rose above the edge of the Temple roof. It came a hand’s width higher than the roof before falling and flowing across the stone. And it kept coming, like dark water pouring up instead of down. O’Gan stood and backed away, checking behind him to make sure the shape was not rising all around. His heart stuttered, skipping beats. He pressed his hand to his chest and breathed deeply, trying to calm his nerves. Not the Mages already, he thought. Please, not so soon! But then a true vision took root and bloomed, faster than any he had ever felt. Whole new vistas opened up to him, blank for now, but begging to be filled. Something spoke through the vision, asking him to open his mind.

“What are you?” O’Gan whispered. This high above Hess, his voice seemed loud. From below came the continuing sound of underlying panic in the streets: voices raised higher than usual, children crying instead of laughing, the clatter of wheels and the steady clomp of shoes on stone. Up here was silence, but for the whisper of this shadow and his own muttered response. His question remained unanswered, hanging in the air like a shape waiting to find itself. This thing had not harmed him-the distant vision suggested that there was no harm here-and yet it was dark, and O’Gan Pentle feared this darkness. Shadows moving within shadows only posed more questions, and however peaceful its intent, O’Gan could not calm the fear he had of this thing.

He moved back until he felt a Janne touching the bare skin of his neck. He felt the kiss of its blossom, but it was cool and moist, rotting rather than growing. The Janne reveled in sunlight and now they were being starved. This will happen everywhere, O’Gan thought. Grasses and herbs, trees and shrubs, our spice farms, they’ll all start to die. This will become a world of rotting things. The spreading shadow paused, as if listening to his thoughts.

“What are you?” he asked again. “What do you want?”

The shadow whispered and flexed like thick water, darker waves forming on its surface. It flowed closer to O’Gan but paused several steps away. He could smell nothing, see nothing other than the shadow, and yet he heard the constant whisper, as though a sea of sand were being stirred by an unseen hand.

“If you’re here to help, then I’m ready to listen,” O’Gan said. “The other Mystics have given up on Hess, but there is fight left in the Shantasi.”

The shadow began to rise higher before him, taking on depth and tone. It formed the shape of a person, and gave it color and character: the dark rents of wounds, the fading light in its eyes.

Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak or breathe.

She was Shantasi. And O’Gan knew her. “A’Meer Pott!” She had been one of his first students over fifty years ago, before going out into the land and never returning. Now here she was again, a living corpse rising before him, showing him her wounds, shouting a plea he could not hear.

She did not react to her name. Her eyes did not change, and her mouth continued opening and closing, dripping lines of dark blood and clear saliva silvered by the moonlight. She had lost teeth, and an eye was gone. Her head had suffered a terrible injury. She was surely dead.

Yet this was no vision. “A’Meer, are you there, can you hear me? Are you A’Meer’s wraith? Have you come for me to chant you down?” Her one good eye glittered with tears. “Are you really there?”

O’Gan reached out. A whisper, a hiss, and her image retreated across the roof before him, remaining a steady five steps away. He walked faster and still she retreated. He stopped and backed away, the image of A’Meer following as though bound to him.

“What is it?” he said. He squinted, trying to make out what A’Meer was saying or whether she was actually saying anything. Her mouth fell open, cheeks sucked in, lips pressing together before the whole movement began again.

O’Gan backed away to the edge of the roof and turned to sniff at a Janne. He chose a bloom that had withered and died, and the smell that came from it was one of rot and surrender. He winced, turning to the next plant in line. This one was tall, its blooms few, and a couple of them still seemed to be drawing strength from the ancient stone in which it was buried. He pressed his face to a bloom, closed his eyes and breathed in.

Hope…a voice whispered, but it was like no voice he had ever heard before. It was a breeze through the bare branches of a tree, the wash of foamy waters on the shores of Sordon Sound, the whispered exhalation of a lover passing seed and giving life. It was the language of the land.

Panting, he breathed deeply of the bloom. He felt the pollen abrading the insides of his nostrils and the sting of rupturing blood vessels, and he tasted the blood that dripped over his top lip. But he did not hear that voice again. He moved to another bloom and inhaled its pollen, glancing back at A’Meer’s image, upright and dead, listening for the single word that had been breathed to him from the first intense vision.

“Hope!” he cried, his mind buzzing from so much pollen. He walked toward A’Meer, swaying across the Temple roof and falling to his knees. “Hope? Is there still hope, poor dead A’Meer?” To see her like this was distressing, but to hear that word uttered at the moment of her death, tofeel it, seemed to justify every Shantasi death. “Hope!” O’Gan screamed, and for a few seconds the bustle of the streets below the Temple died down, and he imagined pale faces looking up to see who dared shout this word.