Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Jossua knelt beside the dead Monk, reached out, touched the back of her neck. He moved her cold head from side to side and lifted her hair. He was trying to see what had killed her.

Some of the wounds were from swords or slideshocks. Others were less easy to identify. The terrible trauma to her foot seemed to have been inflicted by something multibladed, or perhaps by teeth.

“What have you been through?” he said. But she had no answer, so Jossua stood and moved on, leaving the dead Monk to rot into the hillside.

He worked his way through the valleys of The Heights. He had neither the energy nor the inclination to climb mountains and traverse ridges. The valley was shaded from moonlight for much of the way, carved over time by the small rivers and streams that started high up and flowed eventually into Lake Denyah. He took water from the streams, rested by the rivers, and all the while he was amazed by the utter silence of this place.

Last time he was here, the mountains had been alive with noise. He hid himself away up on the mountainside, finding a small hollow in the ground sheltered from above by an overhanging rock and concealed from all sides by a growth of thick yellowberry bushes. From there he watched and listened, content to observe events rather than be a part of them.

Skull ravens had buzzed him, cawing into the sky as they touched on his mind and turned away. People worked on the valley floor, tending crops and hunting, building homes and damming streams to form fishing lakes. Their cattle bayed, wolves howled, children ran and laughed and screamed, and late at night the adults would sit around the village perimeter and light fires, keeping the darkness at bay and talking quietly amongst themselves. There was noise and activity, and Jossua had remained in his hiding place for seven days watching the village go about its business. The mountains were never silent. At night there were animals abroad, and the land itself seemed to breathe. There was still a rhythm to things even then, two hundred years after the Cataclysmic War had plunged the land into decline. The rhythm was upset on occasion, and the land sounded like an old man’s breath on his deathbed…but there was always more than silence. Perhaps it had been the sound of plants growing and dying.

Now the permanent twilight had started killing the plants. The inhabitants of these places had fled, and whatever once lived on the mountains seemed to be still, or dead. Magic’s withdrawal had mortally wounded the land; it seemed that it had taken magic’s reemergence to finally kill it.

A couple of miles farther on, Jossua found two more Monks, both of them dead, both bearing horrendous wounds similar to the first. He barely paused. He had known once the sun failed to rise that the Monks’ cause was at an end, that the Mages had returned to claim magic for themselves. And he had known what this would mean.

But seeing the results of defeat was harder than he could have imagined.

HALF A DAY later he saw another Red Monk. This one was still crawling.

Jossua paused for a moment, unnerved by this, the only living thing he had seen in over a day. Perhaps deep inside he had decided that he would never see a living Monk again. Days spent making his way across Lake Denyah and through The Heights had engendered a sense of isolation, which finding the Monks’ corpses had only exaggerated. Now something else was moving in this valley floor apart from him.

He knelt, tilting his sword so that it did not drag against rocks. The injured Monk was a hundred steps away, crawling so slowly that movement was barely visible. Jossua had spent long nights watching the moons vie for space in the sky, and he had often tried to discern their movements, wondering what it could mean that he only made it out if he closed his eyes for hours at a time. He had once believed that it displayed his disassociation from nature, an inability to perceive the tides of time which meant that he was remote from the land’s true beat. Events of great consequence shifted with the speed of a waning moon, and Jossua missed it all because he did not have the ability to see.

He looked at the ground by his feet, trying to decide whether the shapes and shadows of moonlight in the loose shale meant anything other than twilight. He shifted one stone with his foot and nothing crawled from beneath its shielding mass. He moved another and it hid only damp darkness. The shadows were motionless.

When he looked up again, the Monk had moved a step or two, one hand reaching out as if to grab water from the stream still a dozen steps away.

“You’re still alive,” Jossua whispered, not knowing what this could mean.

He approached the Red Monk. It was another woman, robe badly shredded and stained with blood and the muck she had been crawling through. There was little left of her face. Bubbles of blood formed where her nose had once been. Her hand clawed at the ground, found a hold, then pulled. The fingernails had been ripped out. She pushed with her feet. Her other hand was crushed and stinking of rot, and Jossua could make out fresh blade wounds where she had tried to amputate.

The bad hand would poison her blood, and she still had many questions to answer.

“Lie still,” he said. The Monk lowered her head to the ground and sighed.

Jossua raised his sword and brought it down just above the elbow of the damaged arm. He severed the limb with one strike, and the Monk twitched once and whined, the sound fading to nothing as her body grew still. He kicked the stinking arm.

Jossua knelt and turned her head. She still had one good eye, and he drew close and stared into it.

“I am the Elder Monk,” he said. “You must not die yet. I need to know what happened, and where, and when. You need to talk to me now.”

The Monk opened her mouth and hissed. Her tongue, gray and swollen, scraped at her teeth, flexing aside as she tried to speak. “Wa…wa…”

“Water,” Jossua said. He refilled his canteen from the stream, returning to the woman and letting a few drops touch her lips and enter her mouth. She barely moved, though her tongue writhed like a fat slug.

“Tell me,” he said. “Where have you come from?”

The woman took several deep breaths and pushed herself onto her side, looking up to the sky as though searching for the sun. “I saw the sun set,” she said, “and it never rose again.”

“Where was this?”

“Machines…graveyard…a place where they died, but I saw them live again.”

“And the Mages?”

The woman closed her eyes. “Took the boy from within a machine. Took him away. Darkness remained. That, and slaughter.”

“Where was this?”

“Gray…Woods.”

Jossua frowned and knelt back, trying to conjure a map of this part of Noreela in his mind. The Gray Woods lay to the east, a strange place bordering the Mol’Steria Desert. He had never been beneath the influence of their canopy, but he had heard the stories.

“You crawled that far?” he said. It was impossible. This woman would be dead within hours, and not all of her wounds were old and putrid. Some of them were new. He touched her chest and smelled his hand. Fresh blood, not rank.

The Monk shook her head, and her whole body started to jitter against the ground.

“What?” Jossua said. “What do you have to tell me?”

“Taken!” she suddenly screeched. “Taken and dragged andshredded!” Her good eye opened wide. It caught the death moon and shone yellow, echoing its shape and size in the sky.

“A tumbler?” Jossua asked.

The woman shook her head and snorted. Perhaps it was meant to be a laugh.

“Then, what?”

“No tumbler,” she said. “Monster. God. Demon!”

“But it let you live.”

The woman frowned and rolled onto her stomach, gnawing at drooping heathers.