Tim Lebbon - Dawn

“See for yourself.”

He saw the vague, massive cloud above the hillside; then Kang Kang, its highest peaks appearing above the line of the hill. And then as he drew closer to Hope he could make out the landscape that lay between them and the first of Kang Kang’s foothills.

There was very little left.

“What in the Black…?”

“The land has gone bad,” Hope said, as if that could explain it all.

In the distance, the land had been stripped bare. Trees, grasses and plants, all gone. Above them, a mile or two up, the stew of the land twisted and rolled endlessly overhead. Closer by, at the foot of the hillside they now stood upon, the closest extreme of the fallout area was marked by a giant wellburr tree lying on its side, roots exposed and branches snapped and crushed.

“Mage shit,” Trey said. “The land’s eating itself.”

Hope seemed lost for words.

The process must have started quite recently, because it was not yet complete. In several places the bared bedrock spewed broken columns of earth and stone skyward. Geysers of sand and gravel blasted up toward that cloud of land.

At the edges of the cloud, where the effect seemed to lessen, what went up was starting to come back down. The thuds they had heard and felt were trees and rocks falling back to Noreela, slanting away from the stripped landscape and forming a perimeter banking of refuse: timber and stone, soil and vegetation, thumping back down with murderous finality.

Trey saw a sheebok spinning end over end as it fell in the distance. Perhaps it was already dead, perhaps not, but it struck the ground and exploded, sending glistening tendrils of itself across a slew of bushes and trees.

“We need to move back,” Trey said, awed and aghast.

“We’ll be safe here.”

“How do you know? It may spread. It might expand faster than we can run, and then we’ll be sucked up intothat!”

“Not sucked,” the witch said. “Fall. Everything’s falling upward. It’s stripping the land to the bedrock. Taking it back down to the bare Noreela…taking all the hindrances away.”

“What are you on about?” Trey glanced at Alishia’s head resting on his shoulder, trying to see whether her eyes were open. He lifted his shoulder slightly, trying to gain her attention, but she was still asleep. “Alishia,” he whispered, but there was no reaction.

“We should stay here,” the witch said. “Keep one eye on what’s happening, wait for it to fade away.”

“Maybe it won’t,” Trey said. “Maybe it’ll keep happening until the rock and the ground are all sucked up. Who knows what it may uncover?” He thought of deep mines and the waking Nax and legends of Sleeping Gods, and he looked down at the heathers between his feet, wondering what mysteries their roots tapped in to.

“If it spreads, there’s little we can do,” Hope said. “We can only hope that it stops eventually, otherwise…”

“Otherwise we won’t even get close to Kang Kang.”

“We could go around it,” she said.

Trey looked east and west along the low ridge they stood upon, but both directions vanished into darkness. The cloud above them was huge, and he could discern no limits to the effect ahead of them. Perhaps it went on forever.

“We can’t just sit and wait,” he said. “Alishia is growing younger every minute.”

“Well, we can’t walk out into that!” Hope said, shaking her hand at the strange sight before them.

“You think this is the Mages, like the day growing dark?”

“For what it’s worth, I think not, no. This is the land turned bad as we’ve seen before. The Mages will be busy in the north, destroying whatever defenses the Duke can muster.” She spat at her feet. “That won’t take long. So there’s another deadline for you, fledger. Because the Mages won’t be busy forever, and sooner or later they or their spies will find out about Alishia and what she carries.”

“How could they find out?”

Hope shrugged. “Maybe they’ll catch and torture Kosar. Or perhaps their spies won’t be as obvious as you think. Shades. Wraiths. Other things.” She grinned at Trey then, a toothy grimace that made him turn back to the ruined land. The noise was a constant rumble, interspersed with occasional thumps and vibrations as something dropped. At the base of the hill, perhaps a mile distant, the collection of debris was growing taller and wider, forming a barrier between the normal ground and that beyond.

A hissing white explosion erupted way beyond the barrier, pouring skyward and losing itself in the boiling mass overhead. Trey wondered whether this was a sacred river, revered like that one beneath the Widow’s Peaks. The eruption quickly turned from white to brown as sediment was sucked up from under the bedrock. The water continued rising, bursting out from several other points and emptying itself skyward.

An hour later it began to rain, and Trey sniffed the water for any trace of fledge.

HE MUST HAVE closed his eyes. He was aware of the noises around him, and the heat of Alishia lying beside him on the dew-damped heather, but in his mind he was somewhere else. He was not sure where the other place was, but it felt safe and warm, insulated from the dangers he knew by the remoteness of memories. He could hear his mother singing softly in the darkness of their cave. He could smell Sonda’s skin and her breath as they passed each other in the home-cave, sharing a smile and averting their eyes. He could feel the faces of his fellow miners as they broke for lunch, hear their voices, wallowing in the good humor that came from facing the constant danger of the mine together. Trey was aware of his own breathing and the tickle of heather beneath his cheek, but it was only when he opened his eyes that all those feelings of safety and contentment vanished.

Hope had gone. Alishia still lay by his side, pale and warm, and he could see her eyelids flexing as she explored something unknowable in her dreams. Trey shivered and hugged himself, wishing he had fledge to touch Alishia and see if she was all right. Wishing he had fledge for himself. His heart beat fast, his breathing was shallow, and he felt certain that everything was about to change.

He stared up at the sky. The cloud was still there but it seemed to have calmed, its feathery edges being dragged close by its continuing swirling motion. Some shadows fell away and drifted down, but fewer than before, and the noise of things impacting the ground seemed less frequent. The cloud was a nothing against the darkness, a hole he could so easily fall into. There was no light below to give it any definition, and the moonlight above slid from it as though repelled by its unnaturalness.

Trey looked away, unnerved, wondering where Hope had gone.

He pulled his water canteen from his shoulder bag and poured a few drops into Alishia’s mouth. Her lips opened and her tongue protruded slightly, absorbing the moisture. Her eyes flickered open but seemed to see nothing. He leaned close and whispered her name, but there was no reaction.

Trey took one mouthful of stale water from the canteen and hid it away in his bag once more.

Still no Hope. He stood and walked a few steps along the ridge, looking down across the wide plains between them and the beginnings of Kang Kang. The ground was pale and gray, exposed rock casting back moonlight that slid beneath the cloud, and there were great swathes of shadow where darkness hid in hollows. He looked left and right along the hillside, back at the unsettling scene before him, and then he saw movement. It was like a beetle on the rough gray skin of an old pit mule, only it moved with more purpose.

Hope. She had somehow made her way through the great mountain of shattered trees and exploded rocks to start out onto the bared skeleton of Noreela. She moved carefully, glancing down at her feet yet seeming to concentrate on one single point somewhere ahead. The sky was heavy above her, still weighted with everything that should have been below, but the strange effect had ended. Trey could feel the unbearable pressure of it where he stood.