Tim Lebbon - Dawn

The Nax dragged Jossua until he faded from consciousness, carried away on fledge visions that made no sense to a dying man.

JOSSUA ELMANTOZ WAS over three hundred years old. He did not know how or why he had remained alive for so long, but he believed that it resulted from his purpose in life. It was his destiny to remain alive on Noreela to prevent the Mages’ return. To do this, magic had to be kept away from the people and places of Noreela.

He had never considered the possibility of failure. He was confident in his task and those who helped him: the Red Monks, mad and strong and so committed to the life they led that they thought of little else. If commitment had been a force of nature, the Red Monks would have been unstoppable.

I’m a monster, Jossua had once thought, but only once. That had been a long time ago when he was a hundred years old. I’m a monster. But perhaps it takes a monster to defeat one. And so he had continued to gather other monsters to him, converting them and making them even more monstrous than he, and the Red Monks had waited in their Monastery like a blood bubble ready to burst. Their craze and madness became their life force, a throbbing insistence that death was no easy answer, and slowly their flesh and bones and blood took on the same stubborn defiance against the Black. We’ll all be chanted down in the end, Jossua had once told the assembled Monks, and it will be the greatest death chant Noreela has ever heard.

And now here he was, his body broken and wallowing in fledge, his mind sent to see the truth of things, and the Monks’ final song was barely even a whimper. Its echoes had passed across the land without touching a blade of grass or turning a sand rat’s head. The Red Monks’ wraiths were loose and mad, awaiting their elusive rest knowing that their whole lives had led to failure.

CLOSE TO DEATH, perhaps Jossua found life for the first time.

His body lay broken and bleeding beneath the foothills of The Heights, Nax sitting about him like shadows. So many open wounds let in so much fledge that his mind soared, passing through a mile of rock with no effort at all, and when he burst out into the Mages’ dusk he reveled for a while, suddenly free of the decrepit vessel that had kept him chained to Noreela for so long. He was old and wise and mad, but with fledge driving his soul skyward he rediscovered that seed of youth, a naive curiosity that had somehow survived the centuries. For the first time in a hundred years he could remember the face of his fiancee as she cried him away to the Cataclysmic War. She had been so proud being betrothed to a novice pagan priest, and he had shunned her as he left. Perhaps he had been afraid, knowing that he would never return. Or maybe at that moment he had already found his purpose. The cruise down the River San had been like being born again, leaving behind the safety of normality and emerging into this new life of war, battles against the Krotes, everything that had followed. He wondered what had happened to his fiancee. She must have grown old thinking that he was dead. Perhaps she married, had children. And that thing she had placed in his hand, the cool metal of a brooch or other lucky charm…he had opened his hand without looking and let it sink into the water, drowning his past.

Spinning high over The Heights, Jossua tried to imagine where that charm was now. It would be buried in silt after so long, unseen from above, unknown from below. Waiting there for someone to find it again. Perhaps it would take ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, and when it was eventually discovered there would be stories built around it, tales that could never be true because there were a billion different stories in Noreela, and he did not even know the truth about himself.

He sensed something to the east, a flicker in the stillness of the night. He floated that way and drifted lower to the ground, and there he found a dead Monk, his wounds home to insects and other crawling things. The Monk’s wraith hovered over his corpse, mad and moaning and terrified of the mind that approached.

Don’t be scared, Jossua thought, and the wraith stilled. I’ve come to chant you down.

He had no idea whether it would work. But he stilled his floating mind and shut himself off from the world, and as he imagined the words of a death chant he sensed the wraith fading to Black.

HE MOVED ON, traveling farther from his body with every second that passed. He found more Monks, all of them having died on their journey toward the Monastery. Their wounds were terrible, and their tenacity impressed him. He calmed their wraiths and chanted them down. Every few minutes he opened his mind to his own body and felt the agony of gaping wounds, content in the pain because it meant that he was still alive. He had never used fledge, and he spent an occasional panicked moment thinking that he too had become a wraith craving the Black.

The Nax wanted me, he thought. They sought me; they needme. There is more to my life than this.

He went farther, passing over a gray forest where things screamed and plotted, and he rose higher than ever to avoid their touch. There were many dead Monks down there-he could sense their wraiths wailing, staining on the gray like blood splashes on ash-but he could not bring himself to tend them. He could not save everyone. Whatever mad things inhabited those woods had the Monks for themselves, and Jossua would not think of them again.

He cast backward and felt his body beneath the ground, coughing blood into the fledge seam. The Nax were still there, heartbeats so far apart that they may as well have been dead. Waiting. Guarding him. And every now and then something would reach out and touch his skin, ensuring that his heart still beat and his blood flowed.

Jossua journeyed on, and soon he sensed a concentration of confused wraiths ahead of him, every one of them a Monk. He slowed, rose higher and then smelled something that almost made him turn around and flee the way he had come.

Down there in a large depression in the land, magic had happened, and it had left a residue of itself in the ether.

Jossua moved on, gliding up a slope and emerging above the bowl in the land. And there were the machines, still and dead yet scarred with fresh scrapes and scars. They were clean of vegetation. And there were Monks, hundreds of them lying dead and dismembered across the ground. He went to them, chanting all the while and feeling their wraiths slip gratefully away to the Black.

JOSSUA CHANTED LONG and hard, and with every Monk that left the world he felt more and more alone. Am I the only one left? he thought. I was the first, many years ago. Am I now the last? The awfulness of what had happened here pressed in on him, crushing his mind to a small, defensive point that he was terrified would blink out at any moment.

I’m still alive, he thought, and he felt the Nax touching his body a hundred miles away.

I still have purpose. They called for him and he left, chanting down the last few wraiths as he fled.

I will not yet admit defeat.

He felt the mockery of the Nax, stroking his rent flesh and reeling in his mind as though they controlled the drug. He prayed to the Black that whatever it was they were holding him for, he would find out soon.

THE NAX TOOK him out of the ground. He did not know how long he had been down there-it could have been a hundred weak heartbeats, or perhaps it was days. They dragged him as they had on the way down, but this time they cleaned fledge from his wounds as they went. He felt a hot fluid scorching his opened flesh, his face, his hands, and when a few crumbs of fledge fell into his mouth the fluid entered there as well. It was bitter and boiling, and he spat and gagged as more flowed in. He was forced through the vein of fledge without being able to absorb any of it. The Nax wanted him with his mind attached.