Tim Lebbon - Dawn

The tunnels were illuminated with the sick light of dark magic.

The Mages paused and listened, touching the rock walls, sniffing the air, searching for the dying agonies of Nax. Still they heard none. They made yet more machines and sent them into the depths. One turned rock to ice, another made fledge unreal, yet another froze moments in time, halting history in small pockets of timelessness.

And then, tired of waiting, the Mages started to descend farther, moving deep on constructs of stone and water. They passed through tunnels cauterized smooth by the machines they had sent before them. Angel pressed against rock and summoned her dark magic, melting her hand inside to feel the beat of the land. She closed her eyes and sought the machines they had sent down, placing them all in a multidimensional map in her mind’s eye. Some had gone so deep that they had almost disappeared from Noreela entirely, while others had stayed shallow but traveled far. One machine-shredding the future and leavings shards of timeless vacuum in its wake-had passed beneath Lake Denyah, probing up and out in case the Nax had tried to escape that way.

“There’s nothing,” Angel said.

S’Hivez spread his hands and crunched his knuckles. “Then we go deeper.”

They felt the weight of the land weighing down upon them. The pressures were great, but the Mages reveled in them. Blue flames danced about them as they moved. The stone around them came alive and died again with each breath, and their dark magic filled them, brimming from their eyes as tears.

They found a fledge seam that had been opened and destroyed by one of the machines. Angel paused and listened at its entrance, sniffing, smelling the peculiar taint of unmade fledge. That was all. No echoes of a Nax’s dying sigh. She frowned-something about the ruined fledge did not seem right. She shook her head and they moved on.

They reached another fledge seam, this one untouched by their machines. Angel saw why: the exposed fledge was stale and rank. She scratched at the drug, snorting a flame so that she could see, and the heart of the fledge was also stale. She cut deeper, stepping on chunks of the drug and cooking it to nothing with the heat from her heels. S’Hivez stood back and watched, still listening for messages from the machines they had sent deep and far. None of them returned; their tasks remained undone.

Angel stepped back and turned to her old lover. “They’ve truly gone,” she said.

“No.” S’Hivez shook his head and blue flame trickled from his eyes.

“Yes. They’re not here anymore. The fledge is stale, and they’ve gone. But wewill find them again.”

S’Hivez closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It came out as iced air. “They’ve denied us our vengeance.”

“Only for now,” Angel said, looking around, trying to convince herself. “We’ve got forever to track them down.”

“They’re the Nax. They could go deep.”

“We’ve more to do than this. There’ll be time. There’salways time. And besides…” Angel touched the rock of the land and let magic flow, turning stone to glass, illuminating it, letting visions flicker within its cloudy embrace. “…we have this. And we can always go deeper.”

The Mages left the machines to stalk and haunt the tunnels forever.

THEY MADE THEIR way back up into the Monastery, emerging into its basements and pressing shadows aside as they climbed up to its ruined heart. There they found a shade cowering in a corner, invisible to those who did not know how to look. Angel conjured it to manifest before them, a silent void of potential.

It came, and Angel frowned. “This shade has something to show us,” she said.

OUTSIDE THE MONASTERY, the Mages’ flying machine flexed its wings and knocked over another tree. It shifted its body across the ground, and the movement caused ripples to rise at the edge of Lake Denyah a few hundred steps away. Eyes flickered open and shut across its torso, and mouths gaped to utter deep, piteous groans.

The first time the machine fell completely still and silent was when it heard the land-shattering screams of rage.

“SO TELL ME,” Lenora said.

They were sitting beside Lenora’s machine, cooking meat over a hastily prepared fire while a thousand Krotes did the same around them. Her force had swept through a village that afternoon, slaughtering almost everyone there and stealing their livestock for food. Lenora had granted an hour’s pause to eat and drink. To her left she heard warriors drinking stolen rotwine from stolen tankards, but she knew that they would not drink enough to dull their senses. War was a sober business.

Ducianne smiled, jerking her head slightly to set her braided hair jangling. The sound was as much a part of her as her voice. “It was easy,” she said.

“So I see.” Lenora took another swig of liberated rotwine and looked into the dead eyes staring up at her.

Ducianne had ridden into their camp with the Duke’s head impaled on the front of her machine. She towed his body behind, though by then it was little more than a hunk of meat and bone. Flies and flying beetles had landed on it as soon as she stopped, eating away the last of the Duke’s flesh. Ducianne had jumped from the machine, prized the Duke’s head from the spike and handed it to Lenora.

Lenora had accepted the offering of war with a smile. Ducianne always had been one of the most bloodthirsty Krotes she knew, reveling in slaughter rather than viewing it as a duty.

Now they sat eating and drinking while the Duke’s eyes reflected firelight. As fiery as he’s been in years, Lenora thought. Lucky for us.

“There were hardly any defenses at all,” Ducianne said. “It was disappointing. Yet Krotes will be talking of the sacking of Long Marrakash for decades. I’ll be in a song, Lenora.” The Krote lieutenant grinned. “They’ll write songs about me!”

The Duke had an unkempt beard, scars across his nose from some old disease, and his teeth were black from a lifetime of rotwine. His eyes were open, cloudy and bloodshot, and Lenora was sure they’d been like that even before Ducianne sliced his head from his body. “I’m sure you had your share of pleasures in Long Marrakash,” she said.

“Oh you should have been there…”

“So tell, don’t tease. The defenses? The opposition?”

Ducianne drained her bottle of rotwine and leaned an elbow on the Duke’s skull. “Few defenses,” she said. “Little opposition. They were totally unprepared, and their fight was nothing to speak of. I sent a scout by air as we approached, and he came back with news of a few small embankments on the approaches to the city. Some militia hiding in holes, like rats. Most of them appeared drunk and unconscious. There were some road traps-holes dug and covered over again. But only on the roads, as though they expected us to march on them in line. In one or two places the scout saw more-determined preparations: fire pits, trip ropes, stores of arrows and bolts in firing stations in the trees. Just a few hard places in a belt around the city filled with hollows.

“We went straight through them. I took on a firing post myself, and the militia there couldn’t even shoot straight! I rode in on my machine and their arrows fell around us, and none of them hit, not one. My machine took down the tree and I finished them hand to hand. There were three of them; one dead from the fall, the other two ready to fight because that was their only choice. No soldiers, these. They wore the uniforms of Noreelan militia but they were fat and slow and confused. Probably spent their time drinking and eating and fucking the whores in Long Marrakash. I killed them quickly and mounted again, and we rode on.

“It didn’t take long to break the defenses and reach the city gates. We lost one Krote in that time, though I don’t know how he died. His machine came on with us. Strange. It seemed aimless, as if the Krote had been its brain.” Ducianne bit the cork from a fresh bottle of rotwine and took a long draft. “By the Black, this stuff is fucking evil.”