Tim Lebbon - Dawn

The shade had been busy. The dead were rising. She saw one of them as she rounded a corner, a shambling wreck of a woman with only one arm and a spear protruding from her throat. She wore simple clothes and carried a mewling dead child in one arm. She passed Lenora and her machine as though they had always been a part of this street, and disappeared through an open doorway into a small house. The spear banged the door frame on the way in, and as Lenora saw its bloodied tip disappear from view, she heard the first scream.

She drove onward, riding fast and stopping to fight only when there was no way past the enemy. She wanted to push through and cut the great Noreela City in two with her presence. That girl’s face glanced at her from windows lit by the flicker of distant fires, and ponds and fountains reflecting the moons. The shimmer of her sword caught the child’s reflection several times before being buried in warm flesh. That’s not you, she thought, over and over again. That’s not you. You never were. That’s not you. You never were. It became a mantra, a beat by which she judged moments in time. She saw a lone militia slinking through shadows-that’s not you-and took his head from his shoulders-you’re not her. She held the head up but the shade must have been elsewhere. She looked into the man’s vacant eyes and wished she could question his mind, discover where he had been going and whether the shade of an unborn girl haunted this city.

She haunts me and me alone, Lenora thought, but the idea had the voice she had given her daughter.

She killed a small group of fodder protected only by an old woman. “Why?” the woman asked, desperate rather than afraid. “Because you deserve it,” Lenora said. She saw a shadow moving from the corner of her eye, a fire deflected by something that should not be, and she left the old woman alive.

Entering a large park at the center of Noreela City, Lenora found many people seeking shelter there. They were huddled beneath trees or behind bushes, listening to the destruction and gasping as a building collapsed, rocking the ground and sending balls of fire sparkling into the air. Lenora rode in quietly, keeping to shadows and listening to their voices. She found no strength here at all, no wisdom or bravery, only fear and hopelessness. They had already given up.

She passed through a collection of statue pedestals. There were fifteen in total, though none of them retained the statue they had been built to bear. The most that remained were two legs from the knees down, clad in worn stone sandals. Any writing that had once been there had been erased by time and neglect. Whomever these statues honored-heroes or artists, writers or explorers-history had long since forgotten.

Lenora told the machine to crush the pedestals, and the noise caused a stir of activity across the park.

“You’re all cowards!” Lenora roared. She jumped from the machine and ordered it to remain where it was. Strung an arrow in her bow. Felt the weight of weapons on her belt, stars and knives and slideshock still ready to take their fill of this night. “You hide here like cowards, so expect to die like that too.”

“Please don’t hurt us!” a woman said from the darkness. Lenora sent an arrow after the voice and heard a gasp of pain. A body hit the ground, a man screamed in grief and anger, and the fight began.

Lenora knew that she was being foolish. As she ran here and there, ducking sword swipes, making another corpse with her own blade, she knew that she should have forged through this park on her machine, let it do the killing while she thought on ahead. But the absence of that voice in her mind was disturbing her. She would have welcomed the absence were it not for the little girl she saw reflected in windows and ponds. At least here there’s nowhere to see her, she thought, but she was wrong. As she grappled with one man, jamming a knife into his back as he hugged her tight, she saw the girl’s face in his eyes.

The shade passed through the park and bodies rose to continue the killing. Wives gasped their relief at seeing husbands stand, then screamed as they fell together. Children ran toward shambling parents, mothers smothered daughters and the dead soon outnumbered the living.

Lenora stood by her machine, certain that she would see a little girl’s form emerge from between the trees. She would hear her first-there were more leaves dead on the ground than remained on the branches-but the sounds of destruction were drawing nearer every second. The skies to the north were alight, and sparks and burning embers were drifting down all across the park. Lenora could hear the fire’s roar even from this distance.

South, she thought. I should go south out of the city, find the plains again where there is nowhere for her to stare from. But there were always the eyes of dying men and women, and the sheened surface of her sword. Lenora knew that the girl was beyond her control. I said soon, she thought. I said I’d find you and avenge you soon.

Is this living? that voice said again, at last. Is this what I missed?

BEYOND THE PARK Lenora saw a girl darting from door to door, shadow to shadow. She urged her machine after the child, had it pick her up and deposit her on its back.

“Are you her?” Lenora asked. The girl was screaming, her dark skin livid with sweat, eyes wide with terror. “You’re not her.” Lenora threw the girl aside without even bothering to kill her.

SHE WAS STICKY with blood. It coated her from head to foot, settling on old wounds and seeming to burn its way in. New wounds added their immediacy to her pains: the arrow through her arm, crossbow bolt in her ankle, a cut to the side of her neck and a stab wound in her back, deep and painful and in need of attention. You’re immortal! Ducianne had once said to her, many years before. You’re the one who came from Noreela with the Mages. Immortal, just like them. On occasion Lenora wondered just how true this could be-Angel had touched her on that ship and brought her back from the brink of death, after all. But many times since then she had felt mortality closing in, and she often thought that the older she grew, the more difficult her death would be. Such an unnaturally long life must come with a price.

Maybe this is it, she thought. Maybe on Noreela I’ll be haunted into death by the shade of my unborn child. She craved revenge on the people of Robenna more than ever, but as she fought her way through Noreela City she began to wonder whether vengeance could change anything.

The south of the city was more heavily populated than the north. People had fled down here during the fighting, or perhaps some of them had received word of what was to come. Riders from the north, maybe. Or maybe they simply expected the worst when the sun failed to rise.

Lenora lost her mind in a haze of killing. Fires erupted across her vision. Krotes rode by on their machines, red with reflected flames and blood. Some of them decorated machines with the heads of their victims, and one or two bore a dozen heads that still spat, rolled eyes, lolled tongues. The Mages’ shade was everywhere in Noreela City tonight.

The militia were mostly wiped out in the north, but some remained in the south, barricading themselves in thick-walled buildings with hundreds of Noreelans, thinking that perhaps the invaders would pass them by for easier prey. But they did not understand the Krotes. Machines punched holes in walls and pumped in fire, and the interiors of many structures turned into firestorms, windows and walls imploding as the conflagrations raged.

The living dead walked here too. Sometimes they seemed aimless, but when they found a Noreelan they went mad, scratching and tearing with their hands, kicking, crushing, slicing if they carried a weapon. Lenora wondered what drove them, and she thought perhaps it was jealousy. It would suit Angel’s humor to use magic to raise the dead to be jealous of the living.