Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Kosar looked at the large creature burrowing before them. It looked heavy-its back and sides were armored with scales or thick hide-and he could not imagine it moving quickly.

“You stay here,” Lucien said. “I need to find something. This thing on its own can’t move us, but given the right persuasion it will be fast and safe.”

Kosar waved one hand at the Monk without looking, urging him away. Then he sat on the sand and stretched his aching legs before him, pulling back his feet and toes to try to work out the stiffness in his ankles. His face ached, his back was hot and his ribs spiked a sliver of pain through him each time he drew a breath. His heart was hammering with anger. Stop! it said. Stop right now!

“Can’t stop,” Kosar whispered. “There’s nothing left to stop for.” He glanced after the Monk disappearing into the gloom and then back at the large gray thing, its head still beneath the sand. “I wish I could bury myself away,” he said.

The thing grumbled and groaned. Several feet shifted position and it dragged its head a few steps through the sand.

Kosar lay back. The ground gave a comfortable warmth, and that seemed to ease some of his aches. He stared up at the sky and wondered where everything had gone: no stars, no sun, just the death moon almost directly above and the life moon a smear to the left of his vision. Though his back was warm he could feel the coldness up there, sucking the heat from Noreela like the air taking warmth from a corpse. This land was dead already; there were simply those who refused to believe that.

Don’tbelieve it, A’Meer said. Kosar frowned and opened his eyes. He had drifted off without noticing, finding sleep a strange reflection of being awake. He closed his eyes again and let his breathing slow down, and the memory of A’Meer was there, reading his inner thoughts in her own voice. Kosar was pleased, because he saw that below all the bitterness and anger and exhaustion, he still believed there was a chance.

He slept, meeting A’Meer in his memories, and when he smiled at her the pain in his broken cheek woke him again.

WHEN KOSAR SAT up, the Monk was kneeling beside the desert creature. Lucien kept one fisted hand pressed against his chest, and with the other he was trying to prize the creature’s head up out of the sand. “Some help?” he asked, and Kosar hauled himself to his feet.

“What are you trying to do?”

“Feed it these.” Lucien opened his hand briefly to show Kosar several squirming shapes, each the size of his thumb.

“Why?”

The Monk sighed. “Help me raise it and feed it, then I’ll have time to tell you while they start acting.”

“You’re poisoning it? Killing it? Or seeking the truth like you bled it from me?”

“Do you think this thing will know anything useful? We need a ride. Now help me, or prepare for a fifty-mile walk across the desert.”

Kosar leaned across the creature’s stretched neck and grabbed hold of the bony collar around the base of its head. Its skin was hard and smooth, abraded by decades of sand and possessing a dull shine. He had to curl his fingers beneath the collar to maintain a grip. Then he pulled. Lucien did the same, and slowly the creature’s head rose out of the sand.

Its big eyes opened and blinked lazily. It looked left at Kosar, forward at Lucien, then it slumped to the ground and rested its scaly head on the sand.

“It looks about as lively as I feel,” Kosar said. “You think this thing will carry us across the desert?”

Lucien opened his hand before the creature’s face, displaying the squirming grubs. “Pace beetles,” he said. “It will carry us. Go and sit down, use your belt and straps to prepare a harness. You’ll need something to hang on to.”

Kosar moved away from the creature, still doubtful. Its legs were short and stumpy and it seemed to want to bury its head beneath the sand again. He wondered what it had been eating down there, but had no wish to find out.

He heard the wet snick of the creature’s mouth opening, then the stony sound of its teeth crunching down on the beetles. He sat down and touched his belt, then shook his head.

Pace beetles, the Monk had called them.

And then Kosar remembered the Pace that A’Meer had possessed, and how she had never been able to tell him about it. She had called it a secret.

“You know Shantasi secrets?” Kosar called to the Monk.

Lucien looked up, surprised. “Some,” he said. “It seems you do too.”

“Some,” Kosar said. He touched his belt buckle and started to unthread it from his trousers. He had to untie the sword scabbard from it first. Keeping that veryclose to me, he thought.

“Monks read a lot,” Lucien said.

“So have you been everywhere?”

Lucien fed another beetle to the prone animal. “Not me. But other Monks have, and they come back and write down what they know, and others learn. We all know the same things.”

“Kang Kang?” Kosar said.

Lucien nodded.

“The Blurring?”

Lucien glanced up at him, dark eyes giving nothing away. “Monks have gone there.”

“And?”

“They never returned.”

“I’ve heard that things are undone there,” Kosar said. The Monk did not answer, so Kosar finished extracting his belt and retying his scabbard to his trousers. The belt was thick leather, decades old and tougher and stronger than the day he stole it from a shop on the Western Shores. He fashioned a tight loop at one end which he could hang on to, and the other he left free, ready to fix it somehow to the creature’s neck collar.

“Almost ready,” Lucien said. “Come and tie your belt to its neck.”

Kosar did so, wedging the belt tight into the creature’s bony collar so that the looped end was free for him to hold. “What about you?” he asked the Monk.

“I’ll be making my own handhold. It’ll need a reason to run.”

MINUTES LATER THE gray sand creature was pounding across the desert. Kosar hung on to its back, bent low so that he could hold the belt with one hand and its neck collar with the other. He gritted his teeth and squinted, trying to avoid breathing in the clouds of sand thrown up by the thing’s six feet. Its legs had lengthened from its body, long and slender now instead of short and squat, and it ran with an almost graceful gait, hardly rocking at all. Kosar found the rhythm very quickly, leaning left and right to match the creature’s slight sway and yaw. And below and ahead of him, its mouth opened again in a low rumble of agony.

It’ll need a reason to run, Lucien had said, and behind Kosar the Monk was providing the reason. He sat facing the creature’s rear, his short sword buried to the hilt in the animal’s lower back. There was his handhold.

“Left,” the Monk called, and Kosar tugged slightly on the belt, urging the animal to the left. It seemed just as confident on the soft sands of high dunes as it did on compacted ground. Its long legs ended in wide, flat feet, and they prevented it from sinking, lifting it high and fast up the sides of dunes. On harder, flatter areas its wide feet slapped down and threw it onward. Double-jointed knees dampened the major impacts, giving Kosar and the Monk a soft ride, and soon the rhythms became soporific. Kosar found his eyes closing, head nodding.

Time passed them by, and the creature did not flag. It grumbled now and then, groaned as Lucien twisted his sword or Kosar edged it a fraction to the left or right, but whatever the Pace beetles had given it did not fade away. Kosar noticed spatters of moisture on his face and thought it had begun to rain, but when he looked closer he could see that the animal was foaming at the mouth. He wiped a gob of spittle from his cheek; it was pink with blood. The animal moaned some more, its call starting to sound desperate.