Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Kosar backed away from the trees and headed across the landscape again, wiping a dribble of blood from his temple. He touched it to the sword to sate the metal and resheathed it. It was A’Meer’s sword. It had seen some blood at his hand, but not much, and he wondered at its history. She had told him it was her father’s before her, but that was all. She had kept so much truth from him.

Going to New Shanti suddenly seemed a comforting idea. There he would see many more Shantasi, and he had no doubt that they would remind him of A’Meer. He remembered her pressing against him in a stranger’s house as a Red Monk passed by outside, the heat of her flesh on his, the fear transmitted through her body and breath. She was a warrior, but she found it easy to rely on me.

He walked on. He wondered whether those strange trees had been turned that way by the Mages’ twisting of the new magic, or whether they were simply another factor of the land’s long decline. Or perhaps Kang Kang could affect the land even this far out. It was not a good place. He was shamefully pleased that he was not going there, but he pitied Trey, who had become as near to a friend as Kosar had ever had.

And Hope. The witch, the whore, someone Kosar had never trusted. She was going with them.

Hess was maybe a hundred miles from here. At a push he could walk it in two days-if there were no interruptions along the way-or he could try to find a village or farm and steal a horse. He touched his fingertips together, winced at the ever-present pain and wondered whether his stealing days were over.

SOMETIME LATER, KOSAR realized that he was being followed.

He did not stop or glance back; the feeling was so intense that he did not want to give away the fact that he knew. He sped up slightly, but could hear nothing in pursuit. And yet his blind sense prickled: the hairs on his neck stood up and his balls tingled. His sword was a comfortable weight on his belt rather than an annoyance. It’s tasted Monk blood, he thought, but the idea of a Red Monk following him was not one he wished to entertain.

The landscape was becoming more hilly, bringing the horizon closer and providing more valleys and dips in which the darkness could hide. Moonlight still gave the land a monotone splash of weak illumination, but great lakes of darkness lay here and there, as though the light was not heavy enough to penetrate that deeply. There could be anything on the floors of these valleys. Perhaps they had been this dark for a long, long time. Where he could, Kosar decided to keep to the hills.

He climbed a long, slow incline, panting with the effort and realizing how hungry he was. He had a water pouch that was half full, but he had not thought about food for a while. He would have to stop soon and set some snares, maybe see if he could find some berries or roots to strip and eat. But the plants were dying. Leaves were shriveling and drying, and when he passed a clump of common black bushes there was an unpleasant odor underlying everything, as though the ground itself was slowly going to rot. Maybe this is how it will end, he thought. Maybe the land will just fade away and die. It may take a year, but the Mages have been waiting three centuries for this. Less effort for them. And a weakening land would never fight back.

There was a sound behind him, a distant thud like something dropping to the ground. Kosar paused, head tilted to pick up anything else. He realized that anyone or anything watching would now know that he had heard them, but the pretense could do him no good. Perhaps whatever it was would not reveal itself.

Kosar held on to the sword and felt comforted at the way it fit his hand.

He carried on walking, reaching the top of the hill in one final hard climb. He was sweating and panting now, shaking with the exertion, but stopping for a rest would help bring his follower closer. He could smell rotting plants again, and to his left he saw the outline of a huge old machine rusting into the ground. Yellow moonlight from the death moon bathed its interior and made it more defined than anything Kosar had seen since darkness fell. He had often heard it said that the death moon favored the dead with its light.

He turned around and stared down the hill he had just climbed. For a few seconds he saw the shape way down the slope, struggling upward like a huge beetle. Then whoever or whatever it was must have seen him silhouetted against the moonlit sky, because the shadow grew still and merged with the ground.

“Come on!” Kosar shouted. “Don’t be a coward!”Should be running, not shouting, he thought, but terror had brought out a new bravery. If he was to confront whatever this was, he’d rather do it now than have it follow him at a distance. “Comeon!” But the shadow remained hidden.

He looked across at the machine and considered hiding within its rusted embrace. But then he thought of those old machines rising to fight in the graveyard, the flesh and blood flowing to them from out of nowhere, and quickly moved on.

HE FOUND THE village in a fold in the land. The landscape dipped and rose, and it was maybe a quarter of a day after leaving the hilltop machine that he first saw the faint glow in the distance, all that time aware that someone or something was on his tail, fearing attack from behind and equally afraid of what might lay before him. The darkness was bleeding the strength from him, much as it was killing the plants.

At first he thought it was moonlight reflecting from a huge lake-the life moon had risen higher now, pale, wan and defiant-but as he drew closer across a ridge he realized that it was light rising from a deep wound in the land. A crevasse or a crater, carved into the bedrock by particularly violent waters. He had never been to this part of Noreela before-New Shanti and its environs were generally not high on a wanderer’s list of destinations-and he tried to envisage a map of the area. The darkness still confused him. The Mol’Steria Desert should lie to the north, Sordon Sound to the northeast, and as far as he could recall, there should not have been a river anywhere near here. And yet Kang Kang still lay to the south, hidden by a horizon brought closer by the dusk. Perhaps in the strange years since the Cataclysmic War, one of its rivers had broken out from underground and torn the land.

At the highest point of the ridge, he turned back to try to see his follower. He saw no shadows running for cover, no shapes falling still out of the corner of his eye, but that could mean that the follower was becoming more careful. In this poor light it could be standing motionless a hundred steps away and Kosar would never see it.

It took him an hour to walk down the hillside and approach the edge of the ravine. The glow barely rose above the ground surrounding it, but it lit Kosar’s way for the final few hundred steps. It was a refreshing change being able to see the grasses part around his feet, but he also saw the withered remnants of mollies and chloeys, testament to the dark, and he wondered whether the sun would ever return.

Kosar paused frequently to look back, but nothing else emerged from the darkness.

The light came from a fire. He could smell the tang of burning wood, and a haze of smoke hung low in the air, mostly hidden from sight but detectable by smell and taste. Hangman’s wood! Kosar thought. It was often used on the Cantrass Plains to smoke fish and other meats, because it burned slow and not too hot. Its smoke was spicy and almost as mouthwatering as cooking meat, and he increased his step almost without realizing.

At the edge, looking down at the ravine floor two hundred steps below, he realized how foolish he had been.

There was a village down there, built in a huddle against the sheer cliffs on either side, and through its middle flowed a stream. From this high up the water looked black. The area around the village was illuminated by two huge fires, one built at either end of the settlement. He could make out maybe two dozen buildings, and between them the shapes of people going to and fro.