Tim Lebbon - Dawn

“Hope!” The fledge miner was up there, his head a shadow against the death moon.

Hope stopped beneath the hole and looked at the wave of spiders closing in.

“It’s madness!” she shouted. “Madness, that’s all that’s left for us now!”

She thrust the disc-sword up into the dusk and felt it hit something hard.

The spiders struck her, lifted her body, and light left her world.

TREY COULD NOT sit back and do nothing.

He lay flat on the ground and pulled himself forward so that he could see over the edge of the crevasse. The hole in the strange surface was alive with sound. Hope’s screams, the slapping of feet, the scraping of something metallic on stone…and something else. A hiss. A whisper.

Trey grew cold at the sound, as though he were hearing the breath of a Nax. It can’t be, he thought. I smell no fledge. This is no fledge mine. It can’tbe.

Hope came into view and looked up, and for a moment he thought she was yellowed with fledge. The death moon splashed on her upturned face and filled her eyes, and he drew back because that was a Nax she was running from, it had to be; he could hear it approaching even now. The terror in Hope’s drug-yellowed eyes told him that there was no hope at all.

Alishia shouted incoherently, her voice startling him out of his stupor.

“Hope!” he said.

She stared right up at him, the tattoos on her face tight and straight, pulling down the corners of her mouth, painting an image of madness that he could not look at for more than a heartbeat. Whatever she’s seen has destroyed her. She shouted, and then the disc-sword was thrust up from the hole. He jerked his head aside and caught its metal shaft, careful to avoid the still-spinning blade. It was smeared with dust.

He pulled. Hope helped, hauling at the edges of the ragged opening and then jumping, reaching for the lip of the crevasse and dragging herself out, rolling, tearing the disc-sword from Trey’s grasp and stepping toward Alishia. The witch stood astride the sleeping girl, glancing down, up at Trey, back down again.

Trey looked down into the crevasse. A gush of dust had risen from the hole, hanging in the air and starting to drift back down as though given weight by the death moon. Only dust. She seems so terrified…

He stood and faced Hope. “What did you see down there?”

“You’re slow,” Hope said. “You’re weak. You’re of the underground, and the underground is all dead, all gone, all history turned to fucking stone!”

“What are you on about? What’s down there?”

“Nothing now!” She spat on the ground and stared at her mucky spit for a while, as though expecting it to come to life.

“Alishia said-”

“She’s all that’s left,” Hope said, her voice softening. “The only hope for the world. And you…you’re of the underground. Slow. Weak. Fledge rage taking you down.”

“Hope…” Trey stepped forward, hand held out. He didn’t know why. To take the disc-sword? To offer a comforting touch? The witch looked down at the sleeping girl, and when she looked up again her eyes had changed.

They were dead. Dry as stone, deep as the pit she had just emerged from, surrounded by the tattoos that seemed to contour her face around the two black eyes. “You’re no good for her,” Hope said. And then she lashed out.

Trey stepped back, but the disc-sword’s blade was spinning and the witch knew how to wield it. She pivoted forward on her front foot and slashed from left to right, increasing the killing arc of the weapon. Trey’s arm went down in a reflex action, and the sword passed through his bicep and into his chest.

It felt as though he had been splashed with freezing water. His skin opened and exposed his flesh to the night.

Someone shouted, and it may have been Trey. Blood warmed the skin of his arm, flowed down his chest and across his stomach.

I still can’t feel the pain, he thought. That’s bad. That’s shock. It’s like ice water…I wonder how far I’ll fall. I wonder what I’ll see.

For a while he was back in the fledge mines, because everything had gone dark. He was someone else communicating with his wounded body. He reached up and touched his own face, felt the pain and fear etched into his expression. Ran his hand down his arm to the ragged wound there. Across his chest.

She’s opened me up.

But to what, he did not know.

The darkness swallowed his mind as well as his senses. As he drifted away, Trey felt the first hint of the pain that would welcome him were he ever to wake again.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn

A THOUSAND MORE Krotes had arrived, and now it was time to march.

Ducianne left first, followed by her force of three hundred Krotes. Several flew, most walked, some crawled like snakes. They gathered at the western outskirts of Conbarma and then wound out across the plains, Ducianne at the column’s head, standing on her stone-slabbed machine and whipping her bladed hair from side to side. Lenora sat on her own machine and watched them go. Bring me the Duke’s head, she had told Ducianne. I’m for Noreela City. Meet me on the way, or meet me there, in which case I’ll have already taken it.

And so the real war to take Noreela began. Lenora felt a thrill of history running through and around her; she was the hub of its stories and pathways. Things were closing in on her, and moving out. The past was ending at the tip of her sword, and the future would be built upon her actions. There would be stories and songs written about her, and her name would be uttered in awe. This stinking world had existed in a state of stagnation for three hundred years. The next few days would see more change than any Noreelan had experienced in their lifetime.

Lenora fingered the ears strung from her belt. She knew most of them by touch. Here was the Krote who had come at her a century before, determined to usurp her as the Mages’ most trusted warrior: Lenora had gutted him and sliced off his ear while he was bleeding to death in the snow.

And here, the large bristly ear from a wild creature they had found on one of the hundreds of small islands east of Dana’Man. It had lived in a commune of sorts, with roughly built homes, some attempts at crop growing and a range of basic weaponry. But it was more beast than human-not a race that could be incorporated into the Krote army-and Lenora and her fellow warriors had set about slaughtering its tribe for food and skins.

She ran her fingers farther along the belt, each dried and shriveled ear inspiring memories more powerfully than any smell or sound. Lenora was a creature of violence, and the feel of the knotted edges where she had slashed these ears from her victims set her heart racing. A woman from one of the tribes living in the glaciers of Dana’Man, a creature from the far northern shores of that damned place, a young girl who had come at her with a knife after Lenora had slaughtered her parents…

And then at the front of her belt, closest to the knot that held the leather tight, the still-soft ear of the watcher on Land’s End. He had been the first Noreelan to die at a Krote’s hand since the end of the Cataclysmic War. Lenora had killed him. That had felt good, and the ear belonged on her belt more than any other.

Soon there would be many more.

Her blood was up, and her dedication to the Mages made her proud. That distant voice may come and go, yet she had a land to subdue before she could pay it heed.

Lenora closed her eyes and banished her unborn daughter’s shade deep in her mind. Its time would come, but later. Much later.

Now there was blood to spill.

THEY RODE SOUTH and passed through the cultivated fields surrounding Conbarma. Dusky light revealed diseased crops and trees, too far gone to have turned this way since the Mages cursed away the daylight. Lenora rode her machine along a rough dirt track between stone walls, but other Krotes rode across fields and through sparse hedges, kicking up the stink of rot from the ground. This was a crop that would never have been harvested. Lenora leaned down and plucked the fat head of a grass crop she could not identify. It was slick with decay, its yellow seedlings turned black and damp.