Tim Lebbon: Dawn

My gods, she thought, what have you created?

Lenora turned the machine and stood on its back, and from there she could see right across Conbarma’s waterfront. Every surviving Krote-almost fifty of them-and the Mages were watching her. She felt the power in that, and smiled.

Angel smiled back.

“There’s work to be done!” Lenora said. “More machines to be built, more preparations to make. The sun has fled, and the twilight it’s left behind will be filled with the death cries of Noreela. This is your time: the time you’ve lived for from the moment you became Krotes.” She paused, looked down at the head of the machine with its mad eyes and slavering mouths. “I once saw the northern shores of Noreela awash with blood, and that memory has always been bitter, because the blood was my own. Now it’s time to stain the land again, this time with its own blood. Noreela will fall; there’s no doubt of that. It’s the manner of that fall I look forward to seeing.”

More fire, she thought, and the machine formed several balls of flame and sent them to hover above the heads of the Krotes.

The warriors cheered, the fire reflected in their eyes. Lenora walked the thing among them, letting them reach out and touch its cool stone and cooler flesh. The fires faded, but in the twilight they all became familiar with this thing that would help them win the war.

Lenora smiled at Angel and S’Hivez, and she saw that they were pleased.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn

ALISHIA KNEW THAT she was dreaming, yet she could feel the books coming to life.

Her stroll through the library seemed to last forever. She could not recall where she had begun, and she had no inkling of where she was going. There were only walls of books. There was no ceiling, only hazy heights where the weird light that suffused the air at ground level faded away into a colorless dusk. Beneath her feet there was the ground: stone and dust here; worn timber boarding there. She had passed through one book-formed alley where the ground was comprised of uprooted grave markers laid flat. She had knelt and touched the carved stone, but the engravings had been in a language she did not know, all the names strange to her. Beside these markers, the book spines revealed intimate histories of the unknowns buried there. A Moment on the Road for Shute, one read. A Thought in a Cave at Whimple, said another. She had run her fingers along the worn spines, but she dared not remove a book and start reading in case she became trapped in one moment forever.

Sometimes the stacks were built straight and tall, and they converged in the distance until it almost looked as though they were touching. Perhaps if she walked fast enough she would reach a point where the walls met, spines converging, pages overlapping, and then she would become one more tome of history in this vast place.

At times, the giant shelves seemed ready to fall. They curved left and right, tilted outward or inward, and on several occasions she found herself moving through a tunnel of books, stacks meeting just above her head, histories propping one another up, and she wondered what would happen were she to remove a book. Would it cause a whole wall to tumble down upon her? Would it start a fall throughout the library, burying her and re-sorting history into a random mixture of old books and new, good and bad? Would it destroy order?

She thought not. And dwelling on this she realized that therewas no order around her, only assembled chaos. The books were not sorted into sections; they were random. There were occasional groupings-such as those applying to the owners of the grave markers-but as Alishia fingered her way along the assembled spines, these soon blended into other areas, other times. A kiss became a turning wheel became the one-hundred-and-seventeen-thousandth stolen thought of a skull hawk’s life. This was history built as it had been made, like a collection of random thoughts in a mind too huge to contemplate.

And they were coming to life. Alishia had known this for a while-in the confused memory of her walk through this place, the exact instant of knowing was obscured-but it did not frighten her, and it did not surprise her. All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages. She had often lain awake in her room at the edge of Noreela City and tried to imagine one book in her own darkened library, what it looked like at that moment with no one there to view it, how the words read with no one there to read them. Its pages would be closed and the spaces between leaves dark and inscrutable, but the words were still there, telling their truths and hinting at so much more. Sometimes she believed that true magic could only take place with no one there to see it. Her own interaction with a book would change it, and someone else reading it would alter it yet again. That idea had always disturbed her, yet she kept it alive. Like a person, only a book could ever really know itself.

She walked past a wall of books with instants in time on their spines, illustrated with hastily drawn pictures from a child’s hand. The books seemed to shift in her view, as if rearranging themselves every time she blinked, though the spines always told the same story. She could feel the history behind the books, and she wondered whether she could remove one from the shelves and peer through the gap into a time she had never known. But in all this dreaming she had yet to open a one, and she felt that there was a special moment ahead. A special moment, and a special book.

Alishia moved on, and the books began to turn into something more. Their power spilled around them, exuding potential like slicks of light, hazing the air and causing Alishia to wave her hands before her face to find her way through. Her hands and arms disturbed drifting moments of history, and she suddenly knew them: a Mourner, chanting down the wraiths of a whole village and fearing something that lived in a hole in the ground; a man and woman journeying into the depths, passing through new cities and entering older places; a young boy standing on a cliff somewhere in the west and looking out at the forest of masts spiking the sea’s horizon. Each image was imbued with the emotion of the moment, and Alishia went from fear to excitement to angst in the space of several seconds. She closed her eyes and ran.

She crossed her arms and held her hands beneath her armpits, but experiencing these spilled moments was nothing to do with touch.

Alishia stopped then, dropping to the worn timber floor, realizing suddenly where she was: this was a dream, and she was floating in Noreela’s rich and varied history. She was awash with it. She could walk forever, but she would find no walls. She could try to climb the stacks, but she would not find their summits, because they probably rose endlessly. Every truth lay here, every event, every lie and deceit and murder and rape, every meaningless moment and whispered oath lost to the winds of time, and if she wandered forever, perhaps she would know it all. History tumbled down around her and became the air of this dream library, and each time she breathed in she knew something more.

Knowledge had always been Alishia’s drug, and she closed her eyes and breathed deep.

But something was wrong. Beyond her dream the world had changed forever; something bad had come into the land. She could remember seeing Rafe taken out of the flying machine by the Mages. She could still feel the blast of heat and light in her mind that his going had inspired, and she was beginning to realize that, in a very real way, she was a vital part of this dream library. Alishia could wander here forever and never find what she was looking for, but she was not simply a visitor. This was not a random dream brought on by recent events. She was the librarian.