Tim Lebbon - Dawn

She felt the vibration of something striking the ground. More screams, more impacts, and a hundred heartbeats later the sounds faded across the hills. Hope blinked and exhaled her held breath, and it was as though nothing had even happened.

Alishia had already started walking again. Hope hurried to catch up. Whatever had flown flew no more. Hawks? she thought. Machines?

WHEN THE PATH began to fade away, Alishia feared that they were finished. Perhaps it had always been just another trick of Kang Kang, to lead them this far into the heart of the mountains and then leave them at the mercy of whatever might dwell here. She walked on anyway, determined to retain her confidence before the witch. Something rumbled higher up the mountainside, like a giant stomach contemplating food.

The snow began to clear.

A voice spoke in her mind, muttering words she did not know, and she gave those words to the air. The witch was glaring at her-she could feel her mad gaze simmering the air behind her-but Alishia carried on. Speaking the words was different from having them spoken to her, and Alishia hoped that soon she would understand.

She crested a ridge, looked down into a valley and knew exactly where those words came from.

“We’re here,” she whispered. She heard running footsteps behind her and the witch was at her side, kneeling in the thinning snow and looking down into the valley before them.

“Too soon,” Hope said. “Not where it should be!”

“Perhaps it moved…” A voice spoke once more in Alishia’s head, and this time she understood. “We can go down,” she said. “They’ll allow that, at least. But at the mouth of the Womb we have to stop and wait.”

Hope could barely talk. “Wait…for what?”

“The offerings.”

The witch was shaking her head, denying what she was seeing. But Alishia looked with a child’s eyes, and she could believe.

THE VALLEY WAS bare of snow, green, lush with vibrant grasses and shrubs, spiked here and there with clumps of trees that grew two hundred steps high, their trunks forty steps around at the base.

“I can see,” Hope muttered. “And they’re not here.”

A breeze blew across the valley and rustled its grasses, sending a wave from one side to the other. At its base a stream flowed, heading south and disappearing into the darkness of a ravine at the far end. The stream’s source lay on the valley slope below them. A hole in the ground, hooded with a slab of rock and centered in a wide splash of bright blue flowers. Alishia had never seen those flowers, but she had read of the mythical birth-blooms that midwives had once carried as a sign of their profession.

“I can see,” the witch said again. “It’s done. It’s happened; we’ve won!” She grabbed up a fistful of wet soil, pressing her fingers together until it seeped from her hands, muttering under her breath and frowning when nothing happened.

“Are you so hungry for magic?” Alishia said.

“Yes!” The witch stood and thumped the disc-sword on the ground.

“Nothing is won,” Alishia said. “If only it could be so easy. So fair. But I don’t think anything will be easy or fair ever again.”

“But it’sdaylight down there! I can see the colors of grass and flowers, and the trees, and the stream flowing into the distance…”

“And behind us?”

Hope glanced back into the darkness they had traveled through. The truth dawned. “It’s not really daylight.”

“Not really. Something from the Womb, perhaps. Or the Shades of the Land.”

Hope looked dejected, and angry. “And where are they, these Shades? Are they who you speak to when you slink off?”

Alishia shrugged and looked away, disturbed by Hope’s antagonism. “Somethingwhispers to me,” she said. From the library, she thought, but she did not want to say that aloud. It was a special place, and she did not wish it tainted. “As for the Shades…I think we’ll see them soon.”

Alishia stepped from darkness into light, but it was not as comforting as she had hoped. There was no sun heating her skin, no blue sky above. This was not daylight, but simply an absence of night. The light rose from the grasses and flowers, the trees and ragged shrubs, simmering in the air and presenting the same blank sky as the twilight that had fallen across Noreela days ago. The sense of it silenced Alishia, and even Hope fell quiet as they walked down the steep slope toward the Womb of the Land.

When they arrived, Alishia sat down amongst the birth-blooms. They smelled gorgeous. She closed her eyes to rest.

When she opened them again the Shades of the Land made themselves known at last.

ALISHIA SEEMED TO die. One moment she was there before Hope, sitting down in the long grass and flowers and sighing as she took the weight off her legs. Then she fell back to the ground with a grunt.

Hope dashed to her side, cradled the girl in her arms, shook her, breathing stale breath into her mouth in the hope that it would bring her back.

But the girl was still and limp, and when Hope pressed her head to Alishia’s chest she heard nothing inside.

SHE WAS BACK in that vast, endless library, but so much had changed. It was a silent place this time, with no tumbling book stacks or rampaging shades to steal away the peace. And all the flames had gone, because all the books were burned.

Alishia walked between two cliffs of shelving. She looked up, unable to see the top because of the gently drifting haze of smoke high above. Where the shelves had once been stacked with books, there was now only ash. A few pages remained here and there-the dregs of memories to yellow, crumble and finally fade away-but this place was no longer a library at all.

Alishia released one single sob and walked on.

She turned left and right, following the corridor between stacks and never once finding a whole book. Her feet kicked through drifts of ash. Some of them came up to her knees, and she wondered at the countless forgotten things around her. She could never know them, because ash cannot be read.

She realized that she was crying. A few tears dropped to the floor and darkened, sinking down and forming small pits in the ashen surface. She moved on, wiping her face because she did not wish to leave anything of herself behind.

She reached a reading area, with leather chairs and a low table piled with burnt books. She was not surprised to see a young man sitting in one of the chairs. She thought she recognized him. Someone from Noreela City, perhaps? A visitor to her library, someone she had regularly passed in the street? He smiled at her. Everything about him was familiar, yet just out of reach.

“We thought it would be easier for you if we presented ourselves like this,” the man said, and she almost knew his voice. “Please, take a seat.”

Alishia sat down, perfectly at ease. The man was quite young-perhaps the age she had been when this began-and his clothing was unremarkable. There was a constant smile on his face, but she noticed that it seemed not to touch his eyes. They were dark, and deep. She felt as though she could lose herself in there. They reminded her of that place beneath the library floor.

“I’m frightened,” she said, no longer at ease.

“Don’t be. We’re not here to hurt you.”

Alishia looked around, expecting to see more people stepping from the charred shadows.

“We’re all here,” the man said, touching his chest.

“You’re the Shades of the Land,” Alishia said, and the man nodded. “The Birth Shade,” she continued, “and the Death Shade, and the Half-Life Shade.”

Again, the man nodded. “You’re a wise young girl.”

“I’m not as young as I appear.”

“Obviously. Strange. But we accept that, because it is.” He stood and walked around the reading area, kicking casually at a pile of ash. “Human history has turned to smoke,” he said, “and there’s no future to be written. Not here. Not as things stand.”