Tim Lebbon - Dawn

ALISHIA’S LIBRARY WAS still burning, but she was immune to the flames. The books were not. She could smell the tang of blistering paper and warping card, and the stench of ancient inks released a smoke that she knew to be hallucinatory. But could she hallucinate when she was already in a dream? She breathed in deeply to find out, and a staircase took her down to another level. The stairs curved down to the left, spiraling beneath the library but never leaving its identity behind. Books still lined the walls, all with titles she did not, or could not, understand. Even though she could not speak many old languages, still she usually recognized them for what they were. These were all unknown to her. She took out one book at random, sat on the stone step and rested it across her thighs. It was bound in thick red card, its color still vivid even though she was sure it had been shelved here for hundreds, or thousands, of years. When she opened it, a flattened spider fell from between the pages, shattering to dust when it hit the floor. The smell of age wafted out. She turned the pages, not recognizing any of the words or the language they formed, but still distressed at the way they looked on the brittle paper.

She closed the book and shelved it again, moving farther down the staircase. She thought perhaps she was going deeper into her own mind, but at least the flames were only burning above her now. They were eating away at history, but something told her that the history that really mattered to her-the stories from the past that could help her future-were stored down here. She hoped that the staircase would not act as a chimney and suck the flames down.

There was another library. This one was in a cave rather than a building, its ceiling hanging with stalactites of ancient paper that had petrified into solid carvings. She saw forms that did not bear seeing, and shapes that hinted at more terrible things she could never know. She looked up, expecting floorboards, but the roof of the cave was impossibly lined with books. The floor too, row upon row of spines facing upward, and wherever she walked she heard the crackle of old bindings breaking beneath her feet.

She knew where she was going. The book she plucked from the wall was not as old as many of the others, but its spine was worn and the pages weathered as though it had been read thousands of times. She checked inside the front cover, but there was no marking to show that it had ever been taken from the library.

“That’s because this isn’t really a library,” Alishia said, and the books seemed to lean in disapprovingly.

She sat on a pile of books leaning against one wall and opened the new volume. One Afternoon in Pavisse, it was titled, and the first page told her about a witch called Hope who had stilled a man’s heart with a long, thin knife while he was rutting with her. The witch had smiled and welcomed the gush of blood across her chest. The description of his penis shriveling within her as he died was long and detailed, the sensations lovingly rendered in words. Alishia closed her eyes and turned a few more pages, reading again, seeing how the witch had eaten a meal from a plate resting on the cooling man’s back and then carefully used her fruit knife to carve away a tattoo that covered one side of his scalp. She would paste it to one of the small windows in the basement room to dry, and later she intended to sell it for information. There was no mention of the information the witch sought. The book ended with the witch preparing to dispose of the body.

Alishia slammed the book closed and reshelved it. We’re in danger, she thought. She never was out for us; she’s only for herself. She’ll kill us as easily as that man, and cut out anything she needs. She stood and walked to the other side of the room. She did not know which book she was looking for, but shedid seem to know the ones to discard. She ran her fingers along many spines and received a rush of sensation. She felt disgust, fear and revulsion, and mixed in with that was a brief moment of ravenous hunger. Just moments in her life, been and gone, done with now. No threat to us. But theywere a threat, she knew that, because every book in this new cavernous library told Alishia what a desperate woman Hope really was.

She plucked a book from the shelf without reading the spine. She remained standing this time, not wishing to settle down to view something from Hope’s life, but when she opened the book she realized that only the first page had been used. It was an illustration with a few notes beneath. The picture was of a spider, fat and orange, and the caption readgravemaker spider. Underneath, the words read: stilled for now, numbed with hedgehock, but a pinch of salt will wake it.

Her book speaks volumes of danger, Alishia thought. Then she said it as well, but smoke from the fire above had started to seep down the staircase, and her throat was dry and sore.

She ran back up to the main library and lost herself again amidst the towering stacks of books. There was more here that would help her, she knew, much more. All she had to do was find it.

KOSAR HAD SPENT many of his younger years traveling across Noreela, working and stealing and living his life as he wished it to be lived. He had seen many worrying, wicked and strange things, and almost all of them had happened during the day. It seemed as if the rot setting into the land gave weirdness more audacity, so that it was no longer relegated to dark places. Daylight had slowly become an alien place.

The dark had always been simply another part of Noreela. Nothing fearful hid there, because it no longer needed to.

But now the constant twilight was squirming beneath his skin, setting him on edge and starting to affect his judgment.

To begin with he was certain that he was heading east, but as more time passed his doubt began to grow. The toothed shadow of Kang Kang silhouetted against the sky had faded over the horizon to his right, yet it still felt as though he was traveling in the wrong direction. He ignored the sensation initially, looking down at the ground before him and walking on. Then he started pausing, looking back the way he had come, wondering whether his senses had become so confused that he was actually walking exactly the wrong way.

The moons offered him no clues, and all certainty was fleeing him.

When he came to a copse of trees, he examined the trunks and exposed roots, looking for moss or sun bleaching so that he could tell direction. But the trees seemed to swim in his vision, swaying as though his eyes were watering. When he wiped his sleeves across his face and looked again, the trees had changed position. They hissed and spat.

He stood and backed away, looking up into their canopies. Leaves had shriveled and already started to drop, and the exposed branches looked like skeletal fingers reaching for the moons. They waved at the sky and groaned as they rubbed together, and Kosar turned and ran.

In his panic, he tripped and banged his head. He lay dazed for a few heartbeats, rolling onto his back and looking up at the blank, black sky. No stars with which to plot his position; no sun to chart his course; just a uniform darkness, so distant and yet so heavy and close that he felt it crushing him into the soft subsoil that was the skin of Noreela itself.

“Fuck!” Kosar leapt to his feet and drew his sword. “Fuck! Fuck!” Shouting scared him-the sound was loud across this silent landscape-but it also made him feel better. The blade could do nothing against darkness, but his words could penetrate the silence. He shouted again, mixed curses and pleas, and in the distance something crashed through some trees and bushes and took flight. He saw a shadow heading up into the sky, and though he did not know what it was, it did not frighten him. It was something of Noreela, not of the dark. It was just as afraid as he.