Tim Lebbon - Dawn

She lay there for a while, listening to Noreela being unwritten word by word, instant by instant. What she had read in the clearing was important. But she knew that there was more yet to discover.

ALL OF HOPE’S talk of Kang Kang, the knowledge she held, the stories she had heard, the myths and legends that haunted squalid taverns and desolate rover camps, the screams of those who had been there dreaming about it still…none of it could have prepared her for being there.

She felt totally dislocated. Once she was a part of Noreela; now she was apart from it. This place was somewhere else. The feeling had been growing steadily, though to begin with she attributed it to hunger and thirst, the effort of rushing across the damaged landscape, the impact of her time belowground. It began as a feeling of growing apart from herself: her feet were a long way down, her hand holding the disc-sword impossibly far away. Each step took forever and sounded like thunder, yet still she had the sense of rushing headlong into Kang Kang.

The ghost of the dead Sleeping God was chasing her all the way. She felt it on her back, crushing her down far harder than the measly weight of this shrinking girl ever could. Alishia was fading away, a barely noticeable bulk that Hope shifted from left shoulder to right. The Sleeping God…even its breath would have melted her into the ground. Its ghost, its memory, its unrealized potential, Hope carried all of these with her.

Sometimes she thought she heard it scream.

Hope moved on, climbing the first of the Kang Kang foothills. In all her time as a whore and witch she had never managed to secure a map of this place. It was mentioned in Rosen Am Tellington’sBook of Ways -and Hope owned one of the few remaining original copies of that tome-and yet even that great mapmaker had found these mountains obscure and unreadable. Some of those who claimed to have been here spoke of mountains and valleys, lakes and towers, holes in the ground and the ruins of races immeasurably old and forgotten. Others spoke of fields of snow and glaciers with no identifying mark between one place and another. Yet therewere rumors of a map…whispers of a man who had come out of Kang Kang millennia ago with the lay of the land imprinted on his mind…

Hope believed none of it. Kang Kang was not a place to be mapped, nor even remembered. It was a place to avoid. Perhaps shades lived here, and tumblers, and mimics, and other things that no one should ever have to see. But this was not a world for people.

“No people,” she said, looking up at the long slope before her. The Sleeping God watched her back and Hope spun around, Alishia’s weight nudging her off balance and spilling her to the ground.

In the distance, two moons reflected from the stripped-stone landscape like a pair of staring eyes.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “You’re dead and gone! Failed me, failedus, and now you’re just a fossil!”

“It’s only in your mind,” Alishia said. The girl rolled away from Hope, sitting up and rubbing her shoulder where she had struck the ground.

Hope looked at her suspiciously. “We arrive in Kang Kang and you wake up?”

Alishia looked stunned. “We’re in Kang Kang already?”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“Where’s Trey?”

Hope glanced away, trying not to look at the disc-sword she had dropped but failing. Alishia followed her gaze.

“Trey?” the girl asked again.

“He left us. Fled back underground. Found a fledge mine, smelled his damn drug, and he betrayed us.”

“No,” the girl said.

“Betrayedyou!”

“No,” Alishia said again, her voice gentle but firm. She stared at Hope, and the witch did not like those eyes.

“We have to go on,” Hope said. “No time to sit and talk, things to do, a place to find, and you…look at you…you’re…”Is she really as small as I think? Hope thought. Or is this just Kang Kang trying to fool me again? She looks like a child. Or perhaps she’s far away.

“I’m learning.”

“Learning what?”

The girl looked away, up toward the mountains they had to pass through.

“You don’t trust me?” Hope said.

“No.”

Hope was not surprised. But neither, she discovered, did she really care. “It’s watching me,” she said. “The whole of Kang Kang, sitting here where it doesn’t belong, and it knows I’m coming and it knows you’re coming.”

“I know,” Alishia said.

“You know?” Hope stood over the girl, stooping to pick up the disc-sword. “What else do you know? What is it you’re learning? Is magic in you? Is it there now, ready to come back and fight? Give it to me!” She moved quickly, pressing the disc-sword beneath Alishia’s chin and resting her hand on the lever that spun the blade.

Hope, you stupid whore, what are you going to do now? Kill the girl? Take away any chance, any slight hope you may have of becoming what you’ve always dreamed of being?

“If you kill me, Noreela is dead.”

“I don’t care about Noreela,” Hope said. She thought of the petrified heart of the Sleeping God, once filled with such wonder. “Noreela no longer cares for itself, so why should I?”

“There’s more to the land than Sleeping Gods.” The girl was staring at her over the blade, no fear in her eyes.

“What do you know?”

“Some, but not enough.”

Hope shook her head and stepped away. “I don’tcare!” she said.

Alishia stood, and Hope saw how small she had become. She had the body and the height of a young teen, yet the attitude of someone with a whole world on her shoulders. Her eyes were those of someone ten times Hope’s age.

“Come on,” Hope said. “The longer we wait here, the more Kang Kang can plot against us.”

Alishia’s eyes drooped, she swayed, and Hope slapped her across the face. “Comeon!” she said. She grabbed the girl’s hand-it was hot, the skin of her palm bubbled as though burned-and pulled her up the slope.

THE GROUND CHANGED, as Hope knew it would, and she saw the first steam vent. It was the height of her knee, and emitting an opaque mist into the night. She veered away from it, walking across the slope for a while to avoid its exhaust. Alishia followed blindly behind her. The girl was stumbling and dragging her feet, but still she walked on, tripping now and then and sobbing.

Hope breathed in, felt the dry air turn warm and wet, and she had a brief, intense vision of a gigantic army marching toward a precipice a mile high. There were tens of thousands of soldiers there, many of them twice as tall as normal men, all wielding terrible weapons of death and destruction and illuminated from above by hovering globes of molten metal. She could smell the meat of them-rank and rotten, ready to be opened to the air-and hear their diseased breathing, and she had a very real sense that desperation drove them on. The cliff they approached was sheer, and she could see no way that they could climb it. From above, simmering through the night and making it suddenly daylight, great swathes of fire floated down and set the army alight.

Hope gasped and fell to her knees, spitting bitter saliva from her mouth and turning back to Alishia. “Did you see that?” she said. “Did youtaste that?”

Alishia was kneeling, drowsy and pale. “I saw something,” she said, looking around as though searching for a lost pet.

“It’s Kang Kang tricking us,” Hope said. “Trying to frighten us, kill our hope. Showing us what will never happen.”

“I think it’s already happened,” Alishia said.

Yes, Hope thought, it had a tang of memory to it. She looked across the hillside at the flow of steam rising from the vent, slick like oil. A breeze whispered down from the mountains and the steam changed direction, but it danced with the breeze as though playing with it. “Let’s go on.”