Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Kosar could smell blood now, mixed in with the warm hint of spice, and he moved forward again.

“Stay back,” the Monk hissed.

Kosar obeyed, happy to leave the demon to its fight.

What are they? he thought. Skull ravens? There were several shapes dancing around the Monk, darting in and away again, squealing as its blade found them, hissing as they attacked again. The Monk seemed to have limitless energy; the fight went on for some time, and Kosar could not help recalling A’Meer’s tale of her clash with a Monk on the steam plains of Ventgoria. That had lasted a whole night.

The Monk screamed and turned, fell and jumped, ducked and sidestepped, and more shadows fell. It stomped them into the ground whilst continuing its attack.

Kosar sat, wincing when he reached out one hand to the ground and found sand pricking his fingertips.

The fight ended as quickly as it had begun. The Monk dropped one final shadow and stepped back, tripping over its own feet and landing hard on the ground. Kosar went to it, his sword drawn in case the things rose again. As he closed on the fallen Monk, he was not sure which to keep his eyes on the most: the Monk, its bloodied sword still pointing skyward; or the dead things on the ground, their shapes indefinable, their smell mysterious and potent.

The Monk saw him coming and stood.

“Sand demon,” the Monk said.

“Just one?”

“They have many parts.”

Kosar looked down at what the Monk had done. He could not identify any of the parts on the ground. There were long, thin shadows that may have been tentacles, one small round chunk that could have been a head. Flames seeped from some of the wounds, weak and blue, guttering and going out as Kosar watched. The Monk trod down on one of the larger flames and crushed it into the sandy soil.

“It was a strong one,” the Monk said. “They usually don’t come this far south. They stay in the heart of the desert, preying on those foolish enough to cross.”

“How do you know all this? Surely you don’t spend much time this close to New Shanti? The Shantasi hate the Monks.”

“Everyone hates us,” Lucien Malini said. “And I know because I spent a lot of my youth reading.”

“At the Monastery?”

“Yes, there was a library there. Huge.”

“Alishia is a librarian.”

The Monk raised an eyebrow in surprise but said no more.

They walked on, moving together this time, but it took Kosar some time to say what was on his mind. “That thing would have killed me.”

“It may not have revealed itself to you. Sand demons are not all of this world. They…span.”

“But if it had so chosen, it would have killed me.”

The Monk grunted. “They’re very strong, yes.” He nursed his left arm, chewing herbs and pressing them into wounds hidden beneath his robe.

I’m thinking of the demon as a “he” now, Kosar thought. I can’t let myself trust it.

“It revealed itself to you,” the thief said.

“As I said, everyone hates Red Monks.”

They walked on, crossing land that was quickly turning to desert. A hundred miles to Hess, Kosar thought. Maybe a little more. He wondered what would happen when the Shantasi discovered him in the company of a Red Monk.

The Red Monk who had killed A’Meer.

Kosar stared at Lucien Malini’s sword.

TREY WAS IN the home-cavern back in the fledge mines, alone this time, and there were a hundred fledge demons in there with him. It was dark and he made his way by touch, but whenever he neared the entrance to a current mine working, the pain came, so loud and brash that he scampered back into the cavern, hiding in caves, circling the great pillars and lying low in the Church.

The Nax made the darkness their own, creeping around him with every heartbeat. He could smell them, taste them on the air, and they were as alien to him as the topside he had never seen.

He moved across the cavern floor, dodging heavy points of darkness that signified a Nax. He approached another mine working and felt a different pain possessing the rest of his body: the agony of wanting. The scorch of the fledge rage lit up his flesh and bone.

Perhaps one of the Nax would save him? They were fledge demons after all, coated in the stuff, some even said they were made from fledge in its purest, most intense form. Perhaps one of the Nax…?

He moved forward and the pain exploded in his mind.

For an instant, the home-cave was illuminated. The Nax were not ignoring him at all. They were gathered around him, some less than an arm’s length away. They hung from the ceiling high above on threads of fledge, crawled on the walls of the cavern before him, slid up and down the wide column fifty steps to his left, allstaring at him, surrounding him as completely as the darkness that quickly returned.

He opened his mouth to scream, but the Nax were the air.

He ran toward the tunnel once again, certain that its dark mouth was the only place where the Nax had not gathered. Heading for topside brought the pain again, lighting his way and displaying in a flash the hundreds of Nax lining his route. They reached for him as the light blinked out-limbs, wings, flaming tongues-but none of them could touch him in the dark.

He reached the mouth of the working and entered, running through the agony of his upper body.

It’s the fledge rage, he thought, torturing me more than the wounds Hope gave me, tearing me up from the inside, giving me nightmares when I’m already in one.

He ran through the mines, cringing away from the walls of Nax that each flash of pain revealed. It was as though they saw him only when the pain came, but by the time they reached for him he had willed it down again.

The light became more rhythmic, the pain more regular, the claws of the Nax closer and closer to ripping into his dreaming flesh.

He saw himself through their eyes, with their minds. He was nothing amazing at all.

TREY OPENED HIS eyes. However terrible reality might be, he welcomed it.

He was cold. The sky was stained the color of stale fledge by the death moon. The life moon seemed to be fighting a losing battle, and Trey stared at it in the hope that it would grow.

His head thumped with fledge rage. A lump of it-a grain, fresh or stale, beneficial or fatal-would take the pain away. Fledge would carry him home, back to the place he should have never left. Sonda and his mother were dead down there in the ground, two miles below and hundreds of miles away from him, but at least he would have been dead with them had he found the courage to stay.

His arm and chest were boiling hot, freezing cold. Blood still flowed freely across his body, passed between his arm and his side, tickled his armpit, seeped to the ground and dripped down onto the thing Hope had recently emerged from. Trey could feel himself open to the night. He raised his good arm and laid it across his chest, and he touched the meat of himself there, parts he should have never felt. He stank of his own blood.

Hope killed me, he thought, and his mind recoiled. No!

He remembered the look on her face as she lashed out with his disc-sword. He had killed stingers with that weapon in the caves, and it had tasted Red Monk blood at the battle in the machines’ graveyard. Now its steel was smeared with him, its handle spattered with his blood, and perhaps soon that would be the last of him.

No! he thought again. Alishia…

A terrible fear took him, a dreadful certainty. He moaned and rolled onto his right side. His left arm struck the ground, the slashed muscles denying him control. The flame of agony illuminated his night for a few seconds, but this time there were no Nax waiting for him. I dreamed them, he thought. They’re still my nightmare, even lying here like this. He lifted his head and looked around.