Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Snow, he thought. He had never seen it. But somehow he knew that snow from Kang Kang was snow never meant to be seen.

His wounds hurt abominably, and the fledge rage blurred the edges of his senses, lodged behind his vision and hiding just below his perception of hearing. It would be so easy to curl up and let the rage smother the physical pain of his wounds. After that would be madness, and after that death, either from blood loss or from his failing heart. Fledgers in the final throes of withdrawal could make an easy choice: accept death, or fight. Most fought.

But his mother had not sacrificed herself so that he could lie down here and die. Maybe she had seen a purpose in his eyes. Perhaps it had always been there, or maybe their flight up from the home-cavern had made her see him in a whole new way. She had slipped away and thrown herself into a deep crevasse, ensuring that she remained underground forever. She had not been sad when she died; he had traveled to her, and she had told him that this was what she wanted. She was slowing him down. Without her, he would stand a chance of reaching the rising and going topside.

She had been right. And now there was something else slowing him down; his wounds, and the rage. If only they would leave him so willingly.

PERHAPS A DAY passed. Trey fought the urge to sit and rest, fearing that he would not be able to stand again. Many times he believed that he saw Hope and Alishia in the distance, but when he concentrated on the spot where he thought he’d seen movement, the shadows grew still once again.

They can’t be that far ahead, he thought. If Hope is carrying the girl, then she’ll be moving as slowly as me, and if Alishia is walking, she’ll be taking a child’s steps.

He saw a haze of shadows moving back and forth over the ground. At first he thought it was his failing vision, but when he stood still he could hear the soft whisper of their movement. They did not change direction to come toward him. They did not pause to stare. They drifted back and forth just above the ground, passing around and through one another without interruption, and Trey diverted around the place the shadows circled. He tried to see-leaned closer than he should, almost feeling a shadow touch his skin-but there was only a hole in the ground. Darkness made it impenetrable. By the time he had left the shadows behind, Trey was glad.

His wounds demanded attention. His bicep was split and still bleeding-movement ensured the wound remained open-and his chest was slashed to the bone. Sometimes he thought he could smell the beginnings of rot, but he put it down to his unwashed body and clothes, that slightly musty smell of age and decay. He hated to attribute it to the injuries. If the smell came from them, then his blood was turning poisonous, and he would be dead in hours.

My disc-sword has tasted Monk blood, he thought, but he tried to shut that from his mind.

He had no water or food. When he pissed, he caught as much as he could in his good hand and drank it, cringing against the taste but aware that he could not lose the fluid. He had learned harsh lessons from miners who had been trapped for weeks after rockfalls. Drink your own piss, they said, otherwise it’s a waste. And eat your own dead, because if it takes weeks to be dug out that’s all the food you’ll have. At least then they won’t have died in vain.

Kang Kang loomed closer and larger than ever. Sometimes Trey thought he could reach out and touch its mountains, and when he tried, his fingers grew cold, as though buried in the snow capping their upper reaches. Even having spent his life deep beneath the ground, still he knew of Kang Kang. Awrong place, someone had called it. Kosar? Hope? He could not recall, but he trusted their words. It felt wrong even now, miles distant and all but hidden by this unnatural dusk. There was something both alluring and repulsive about the mountains, a sense carried in the air and through the ground. He could not make out exactly where that feeling came from, but it confused his already weakened mind and toyed with his fledge-teased senses.

He bent over and almost vomited, shaking his head to rid it of the smells, the tastes, the sounds.

And then he smelled fledge.

He knelt on the rocky ground, and something compacted beneath his left knee. He looked down, trying not to lose his balance-he felt disoriented, unsure of up and down-and lifted his knee. Mud, wet and slick.

He looked up and sniffed again, smelling fledge and feeling his whole body crave its touch on his tongue, its taste in his mind. His joints ached with the rage.

Mud?

And there before him, several hundred steps away, the ground began to show the darker patches of covering once more. He was almost at the edge of the desert of rock.

“Thank the Black,” Trey whispered, and something close by responded with a hiss, and a touch of some vision on his mind.

He saw himself standing there alone and covered with blood, scared, abandoned, a fledger aboveground and as removed from his environment as he could ever be. And as he wondered how he could be seeing himself like this, the smell of fledge grew overpowering and he tipped forward. Before he struck the ground, something came between him and the rock.

Something hot.

HE WAS BATHING in fledge. He was underground-in a dream or reality, he neither knew nor cared-and around him the drug was crumbling, giving itself to his touch, finding his wounds and soothing them, pricking his tongue with its tangy freshness, setting his blood and his brain afire and readying his mind for any journey he wished to take. It was the freshest fledge he had ever encountered, as though he had found it not only before it was touched or mined, but at the actual moment of its creation. There had been much speculation as to what fledge was and how it came into being: it was grown by the Nax, itwas the Nax, it was the fallout from Nax dreams. But the simple truth of the drug had often done away with such musings. It was like questioning the existence of air or the origins of water, questions both pointless and faithless. What mattered was that they were there.

Trey welcomed in another mouthful, chewing the perfect grittiness into a paste, swilling it between his teeth and below his tongue and letting it slip down his throat. It set his flesh alight and took away much of the pain. Something else touched his mouth, briefly but definitely. He opened his eyes but there was nothing to see, so he closed his eyes again and welcomed some more of the crumbling fledge inside.

He was moving, slipping through a seam of the drug as though he were a fledge demon, steered between rough stone walls and protruding rocks. The drug parted around him easier than it ever should have, coming apart before him and joining again behind. And it whispered all the time, giving him ideas and images that he would never have imagined himself.

The fledge rage retreated, defeated and petulant. He was happy to feel it go.

I can travel, he thought, and he set his mind free of his body, moving away and only glancing back once.

He obscured what he saw from his mind. The drug made it easy to do so.

Trey traveled, up out of the ground and into the cool dusky night. He spun and rose in the air, trying to decide which way to go. North would only take him back over the ground he had just traversed, and he had no wish to see that ruined landscape again. South…that would take him closer to Kang Kang, and while that was not a place he wanted to go, he had need to travel there. He must find Hope and Alishia, and make sure that the girl was still alive.

He moved through the air, a mind separate from body yet still inextricably linked. The ground below soon returned to normal, and he passed through the huge banking of uprooted trees, soil, rocks and dead creatures that marked the limit of this strange effect. He sensed little still alive in that pile of detritus: a sheebok here, a snake there, shaken and confused by what had happened and still trapped. They would be dead soon. He emerged from the other side of the mound into open air once more, expecting to find a normal landscape below him: trees and scrub, rocks and gulleys. Streams, perhaps, originating in the foothills of Kang Kang and venting out onto the plains. Even dwellings.