Tim Lebbon - Dawn

“You’ll sleep,” the demon said. “I’ll have time to think. And when you wake, we will talk some more.”

It pressed something into Kosar’s mouth, a sweet plant mulched and mixed with something more meaty. Try as he did, Kosar could not keep from swallowing. And once he’d swallowed the first speck he opened his mouth and welcomed some more. It took him away, soothed his pain, made A’Meer fade for a time into a shadow of a memory rather than a raw, bloody loss. As he felt the Monk loosening his wrist ties, Kosar stared into the failing fire and saw sunlight once again.

WHEN HE FOUND the Elder Mystic sitting alone in a square on the outskirts of Hess, O’Gan thought he had discovered an ally.

He stood at the edge of the square, hidden from view in the shadow of a giant wellburr tree. He liked the feel of the tree’s bark against his shoulder. It had been here for several thousand years, weathering storms and reveling in sunlight, sucking water from the ground that seeped in from the inland sea of Sordon Sound. It had grown up alone in a wild landscape, witness to histories that O’Gan could not imagine and would barely believe. When its seeds fell they were carried away by the Elder Mystics and planted far afield, taking all the history of the tree with them to give to the fledgling plants that might sprout several centuries from now. Sometimes, those carrying them were given visions when their palms were pricked by the seeds’ spiky skins. And sometimes those visions gave stories that were told on the Temple, bizarre tales of histories that did not belong to the Shantasi. This land had been a stranger to them when they arrived many centuries before, and there were those who believed it was a stranger to them still.

He leaned his head against the skin of the tree and closed his eyes. His mind was still affected by the Janne pollen, blood still trickled from his nose and he sensed a comforting warmth somewhere within the tree’s ancient trunk. It was the certainty that a greater mind than his was pondering events. He sighed, and an echo from centuries before bled through the bark and made him open his eyes.

The Elder Mystic was sitting on the edge of a stone water fountain. The water seemed black in the weak light. It rose in three single sheets, parting as it reached its zenith and then splashing back down. The splashes sounded like nothing at all.

The Elder trailed one hand in the water, swirling it back and forth like a paddle. She remained where she was. Even with her eyes closed, O’Gan was certain that she traveled nowhere.

Her other hand held the hilt of the knife buried in her stomach.

“Elder!” O’Gan said. He stepped from the shadow of the wellburr tree and crossed the small square to the fountain. They were alone. The square was on the western outskirt of Hess, its air heavy with scents from the Mol’Steria Desert farther west.

The Mystic raised her head and turned to look at O’Gan. She seemed surprised to see anyone here. She was very old, her pale skin wrinkled into leathery folds, her black hair streaked with silver as though it caught light from the life moon.

“O’Gan Pentle,” she said. “I heard you were still at the Temple.”

“I was. I saw something. I came down, and everyone was fleeing or…or dead.” He looked at the knife in the Elder’s stomach. Her hand was clasped firmly around the hilt.

“Death is the only escape,” the Elder said.

“Elder Darshall, I don’t understand.”

The Elder shook her head, winced, and her hand made irregular patterns in the water as she shivered with pain. “I did this,” she said, looking down at the knife. “But I lack the courage to finish it. I pull the knife up, empty my guts, twist it and pierce my heart, and I’m beyond their reach. Forever free, lost to the Black, and all the Elders’ wraiths will combine to chant one another down. No way the Mages can reach us in the Black. No way they’ddare. ”

“We can fight,” O’Gan said.

Elder Darshall shook her head. Her hand went back to drawing shapes in the water. “There is no hope.”

O’Gan sat before her on the edge of the fountain. The stone was colder than usual, its heat long since sucked away by the twilight. “Isaw hope,” he said. “On the Temple, hope came to me and showed itself!”

The Elder looked up, and O’Gan was shocked to see a smile on her face. “You young Mystics,” she said. “You’re always so filled with optimism. You don’t appreciate how much the past steers the present. Every breath you take pushes your body in a certain direction; through choice, and experience, and the way that breath informs your heart and mind. The things it plants there. The things it takes away. And likewise, every event of the past makes the present what it is.”

“I don’t understand.” O’Gan looked at the knife, the Elder’s hand, her leaking blood. He wondered at her uncertainty. Was it simply pain causing her to hold back, or fear of the Black? Or was it something else? “You can’t deny hope at a time like this.”

“I know what hope brings!” the Elder hissed. She leaned forward at O’Gan as if to bite him, and crying out when the movement shifted the knife in her gut. She moved back and looked down again, and sat there motionless for a while, concentrating on the knife.

If she does it now, she truly knows no hope, O’Gan thought.

Elder Darshall looked up at him and smiled. “You’ve been sniffing the Janne, even now.”

“If you’re seeing inside me, then you know I speak the truth.”

“You’re thinking about madness, that’s all,” Elder Darshall whispered. “You’ve seen phantoms in the dark. Things…perhaps sent by the Mages to finish us off. Who knows what’s out there now? Who can understand?” Her eyes drifted past O’Gan and became fearful, darting here and there as though following a bat’s flight.

“I heard of Elders killing themselves,” he said. “I saw Elder Garia, dead by her own hand.”

The Elder Mystic nodded. “Garia always was a braver soul than me. And she always understood the truth.”

“What truth? None of us know the truth. It’s the thing we always seek!”

Elder Darshall’s stare was loaded with the wisdom of her years. O’Gan forgot about the knife and blood, and her hand stirring the waters of the fountain. For a moment the whole world was in her eyes. “The truth that we Elders kept for ourselves,” she said. “The truth of the Mages, and what they did to us. And what they will do again.” She started to cry. Her tears shocked O’Gan because they were born of sorrow, not pain.

“Elder…let me help you.” He reached forward to touch the knife but the Mystic pulled back, hissing and almost slipping into the fountain.

“Don’t touch me! O’Gan, don’t touch me. Freedom of will is everyone’s right, and I have mine even now. You have yours also, though I think this darkness is driving you mad. But I’ll tell you. I’ll help you to decide your course of action.”

“I’m going to fight!”

“No. You’re going to kill yourself and join your ancestors in the Black. And I’ll tell you why.

“O’Gan, even the Mystics have a beginning. Before the Cataclysmic War the Shantasi examined and explored magic through their minds. We viewed magic as a philosophy rather than a tool, a way of life rather than a way to make life our own. And then S’Hivez went too far. He was banished, and he and Angel met and fell in love and the rest is known to everyone, but only in detail to a few. And nobody knows everything that happened during the Cataclysmic War. It was a short war but it was fought right across Noreela. Its main battles were along the path of destruction from Lake Denyah and the Mages’ Monastery, north across Noreela to The Spine. But there were other battles, and many of them have faded from consciousness because most were won by the Mages. History is written by the victors and survivors. But sometimes history becomes a part of the land.”