Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Hope’s heart stopped. Her life froze, and her mind thundered on.

Do I die now? she thought. Now that they’ve found us, will my body give in and leave the girl to their mercy?

The Mages’ machine flew on, higher, dipping neither wing to bank back at her.

Hope’s heart kicked in her chest and resumed its frantic beat.

Missed us! She could barely believe it. She cried into Alishia’s neck, shuddering, welcoming the gush of warm breath on her cheek as the girl sighed in her sleep.

HOPE PUSHED FURTHER into the mountains of Kang Kang. She knew that her madness insulated her, but there was something else as well. A distance had grown about her and Alishia. It was nothing visible, nothing she could sense, but it was as if they traveled in a bubble of normality that did its best to hold back Kang Kang’s influence. Perhaps it had even shielded them from the Mages…though Hope had already begun to wonder whether that had been a dream. She heard strange noises, smelled peculiar aromas and here and there she saw things that she could not explain, even in the confines of her madness. But their effects were kept at bay. She moved onward, Kang Kang existed around her but her ever-changing mind was still wholly her own.

“Mad and bad,” she muttered, smiling. Someone had called her that years ago, a customer who had tried to leave without paying. Hope had thrown a powder across his back which raised red welts and left him itching for days. Mad and bad, he had called her, and she liked it now as much as she had then. Mad and bad, that’s me, and you stay away, Kang Kang, or you’ll get a dose of the same.

Rocks ground together, wind drifted down from the mountaintops like bad breath and Hope walked on.

She was changing shoulders more often, even though Alishia seemed to be growing smaller at an alarming rate. She was a young girl now, maybe the size of an eight- or nine-year-old. Her body had shrunk and changed, her face filled out and her skin was pale. The witch tried to dribble water into her mouth, but Alishia spat it out. She tried to feed her dried herbs from her shoulder bag, but the girl’s mouth squeezed tight, rejecting food. Perhaps food would make her grow again. Maybe growing younger like this was a part of what magic had planned for her.

“Fuck fate,” Hope said. She shouted it again, hoping for a response from Kang Kang, but nothing came. Only the rocks grinding, and perhaps that was a language in itself. She listened for repetition in the noise, sounds that might signify meaning, but there was nothing. Could she really ever know the language of stones?

Perhaps they’ll be there, she thought. Waiting at the Womb when we find it. Perhaps that’s why they passed us by…if I even saw them at all.

As Hope reached the ridge connecting the first two major mountains of Kang Kang, standing in snow up to her calves and gasping the thin air as she tried to discern details of the landscape before her, Alishia started to speak. Hope could not understand, but she had heard the words before. She knew no meaning, but she remembered her mother and grandmother repeating them, passing them down through the ages even though their relevance had been lost along with magic.

“Just where are you, librarian?” she said. She was suddenly afraid of this young girl. As Alishia regressed into childhood and whatever may come before, so she seemed to be taking on more of magic.

Alishia spoke the language of the land, and they were words that Noreelan air had not heard in their full glory for three hundred years.

HOPE FOUND A bush of berries, and even though some of them seemed to possess the features of small faces, still she picked and ate them. They burst in her mouth, releasing a sweet, warm fluid into her throat. They could be anything, Hope thought, staring close at a berry the size of her thumbnail. Poison fruit, chrysalis waiting to open…anything. She nudged one and every other berry on the tree swung in sympathy. She picked more and filled her pockets for later. Kang Kang just makes them look like that to put me off, she thought. She popped a few more into her mouth and crunched them between her teeth, feeling for movement that should not be there but finding none. She worked her shoulder to get Alishia into a more comfortable position and started off again.

Hope headed into a valley where darkness seemed to lap at the edges. Moonlight did not find its way down here. She kept the disc-sword at the ready, squinting in the poor light to ensure she did not stray from the path. Even here it was still evident, and when she strayed she found that it was very clear which was path and which was not. Whilst on the path the noises she heard were subdued, the grumbling of Kang Kang talking in its sleep. But when she left the path and felt rough, virgin ground beneath the snow, the grumbling turned into a roar, and an avalanche of rocks came at her from hidden heights. She huddled down to protect Alishia with her own body, but when she looked up again the tumbling rocks had stilled, or vanished. The noise of their displeasure dissipated into the night, and she moved on.

The route fell and rose again, finding the easiest way through the valley, up to the ridge and over into the next valley. The mountains weighed down on either side, but snow was coming in harder now, obscuring whatever the moonlight might betray of their mysterious heights.

Time passed without measure. Hope melted snow in her hands to drink. The water tasted of something she could not quite place. She tried to drip some past Alishia’s lips, but the girl’s mouth pursed tight. Sometimes she sat on the path and cuddled the girl to her, crying and feeling tears freezing on her cheeks. She shared her warmth but received little in return: a sigh here, a whisper there. Occasionally Alishia would start talking again, those strange words unheard for so long, but their meaning was still inexplicable.

She thought of the Mages perched atop their monstrous machine, heading south, deeper into Kang Kang. Not them at all, she tried to convince herself. They’d have seen us. They’d have killed us. Not them at all. An image from Kang Kang? Another one of its tricks? But not them…

Perhaps she traveled for a day, or two days, or longer. The mountains grew higher around her and Kang Kang pressed in, threatening her with a thousand deaths that it seemed unable to deliver. “Is this you?” Hope would ask, but the girl never answered. “Is thisyou?” she asked what was inside the girl. But magic, as ever, was silent.

SOMETHING CAME AGAINST them from the sky. It began as a heavy drone in the distance, turning quickly into a loud buzzing sound that seemed to confront them from all sides. Hope looked around in a panic, brandishing the disc-sword. The shadows appeared from the east, flitting in across the ground and casting themselves large with light from the death moon. Their wings blurred the air like heat haze. Snow was stirred up behind them, swirling in complex patterns. Alishia mumbled something and a strong wind blew up, originating somewhere far behind and below them and roaring up the valley. The flying things came closer, and Hope could make out their long legs and heavy stings, their wings, their heads dotted with a dozen eyes and trailing hair like an old man’s beard. The wind rushed past Hope and Alishia, passing by within a few steps of where they stood without disturbing a hair on their heads. It struck the flying things, swept them into the mountainside, cleared the ground of snow. The buzzing stopped, and the wind died away as quickly as it had come.

Hope saw the broken bodies spilling steam. Some of them twitched, but none of them remained a threat. She turned and left quickly, thinking of magic, asking the question of Alishia yet again and receiving the same silence as response.