Tim Lebbon - Dawn

And then she saw movement to the south.

Ducianne rode alongside her across a wide, flat expanse of dried marsh. “What in the Black is that?” she shouted.

Lenora knew. She had seen some once before in Robenna, years before she became pregnant. One of them had taken a child from the village. Even then, she knew that they were too different to ever understand.

“Tumblers,” she said.

“So let’s take them!”

“Ducianne!” Lenora shouted, but Ducianne goaded her machine on, riding directly at the advancing wall of tumblers that streaked toward them. They jumped here, rolled there, twisting and turning their routes to confuse the Krotes. But the Krotes’ blood was up. All of them were tainted by battle, some of them bearing wounds, a few carrying the stumps of arrows buried in arms or shoulders. It would take a lot to panic them now.

“Ducianne!” Lenora shouted. “Attack together. Not on your own!”

Ducianne turned on her machine and grinned, pulling back slightly so that she fell back in line with Lenora. Other machines rode up beside them, forming a long, snaking line that advanced quickly southward.

“Don’t be so keen,” Lenora called.

“Well, I-” Ducianne shouted, and the first of the tumblers struck the front of her machine.

The joint impact was tremendous. The tumbler was crushed flat and shattered, lifting high over the front of Ducianne’s mount and sweeping her from its back. Lenora glanced around in time to see her friend ripped apart, torso and head spilling in different directions amidst a rain of old bones, torn vegetation and new blood. The machine was split as well, its ruptured parts rolling onward in pursuit of Lenora, finally exploding in a geyser of blue flame as the magic that held it together failed and faded. Lances of cobalt light probed out, sparking here and there where they impacted the ground, and a ball of fire burst from the machine’s dying heart.

Lenora faced forward again, and sadness at the loss of her friend was cut short by what she saw: a field of tumblers coming at her, stretching left and right as far as she could see.

The two main forces of machines and tumblers met. The sound was tremendous, a mixture of machines roaring, tumblers thumping at the ground, Krotes screeching and fireballs and other ventings finding homes. The ground shook and the air sang with the tunes of war. Very soon the two opposing lines had disintegrated, turning into a pitched battle that spread quickly across the dried marsh.

Lenora swerved left to avoid a tumbler and drove straight into another. She tried to pull her machine up short but its momentum carried it on, front legs extended to ward off the huge rolling thing. When they struck, Lenora was thrown forward. She grasped one of her machine’s forelimbs, swinging around and kicking out at the tumbler. It started squirming and flexing, whipping at her with hooked limbs, but her machine unleashed a dozen spurts of flame from slits above its eyes. The tumbler’s limbs were severed and fell burning between the battling giants.

Lenora took the opportunity to scramble onto her machine’s back, ordering it to reverse as she did so. It tried, shaking with the effort, but was held tight. She leaned forward and hacked with her sword. The tumbler squirmed some more, trying to drive its barbs and hooks into the machine but failing to penetrate deep enough to take hold. Lenora sliced through its remaining limb, reaching farther and stabbing at its hide. She saw the bones of dead people in there, one recent skeleton smiling at her with leathery lips and waving a loose forearm.

Fire, she thought, leaning back and closing her eyes. The machine breathed fire and the tumbler lit up, rolling back and trying to extinguish its burning side by crushing it into the ground. And more. The machine coughed again, and the tumbler was aflame, crackling and spitting as its ancient insides ignited.

Lenora did not wait to witness the tumbler’s demise. She rode to the giant machines bearing the cages of the dead, instructing their riders to release the cargo. Wooden limbs were lowered, ropes cut, metal chains severed, and a thousand dead Noreelans tumbled from their incarceration. They rolled from the body pile, rising dozens at a time and moving forward into battle. They passed by any Krote or machine they met, bearing down on tumblers already in their sights. Some carried swords and knives, others had fashioned clubs from thigh bones or spears from sharpened sticks. None of them possessed weapons that would hurt a tumbler.

But Lenora had not released these dead to attack the tumblers. She wanted tosmother them.

She rode back into battle, dodging past the stumbling dead. Several tumblers ahead of her lit up from the inside as blue fireballs penetrated and exploded, their bone cargoes silhouetted against the flames. Inside, the bones were shattered and scattered, but those on the outside were more complete. Some of the tumblers seemed to scream, but the sound felt the same as the voice of Lenora’s shade: in her mind, deep down. Wondering whether she was the only one to hear, she screamed back.

Lenora saw the first of the dead crushed into the ground by a huge tumbler. Several of them remained squirming in the dirt, but a couple were pressed onto the thing’s hide, its barbs and spikes jutting from their already rotting bodies. There was little blood. The thing rolled on…and then stopped. It started to shake. Its limbs whipped back across its own body, hooking into the moving corpses and tugging away, as if to remove them. But they were stuck fast.

Through the shouts and shrieks of the battlefield, over and above the unremitting whisper of her daughter’s shade, Lenora heard the tumbler scream.

It seemed to go mad, darting this way and that, skidding across the ground when the dead Noreelans were beneath it, but it could not scrape them from its outer skin. They were tattered now, barely recognizable as human, but the damage was done. As the tumbler came toward Lenora, stopped and turned away again, she saw a dozen nebulous shadows flung from it, thrashing through the air, landing, little more than a heat haze on the twilit battlefield. But the air was thick here-misted blood, smoke, the stench of the dying-and these shapes soon took form. Diaphanous, ambiguous, the mad wraiths darted away from the tumbler. One of them struck a machine and seemed to disappear. The machine paused. Its Krote rider stood, looked down and shouted, as if angry. And then the machine flipped onto its back and crushed the Krote, its flaming legs thrashing at the air like those of an overturned beetle.

Yes, Lenora thought, this is when the fighting gets bloody.

ALISHIA LOOKED AT the things coming down the slope toward them, and what they carried, and she was the little scared girl she so resembled.

“I can’t look,” Hope whispered beside her. “I can’tsee. ”

“What do you think we’re seeing?” Alishia asked, though she already knew. She knew because Trey was there, suspended between these things like a baby borne by multiple mothers. He was naked, his skin smooth and soft and yellow.

“I don’t know,” Hope said, “but they must be gods.”

Alishia looked at the things carrying Trey, but she could not make them out properly. She was not even sure how many there were. They seemed to shy away from the light, like a shadow fading the instant a lamp was lit. There but not there, a trick of the light and a truth of the dark. What shecould see was terrible, but perhaps only because she expected it to be so: ragged wings, long limbs with reflections of hooks, blades and nails, and faces that seemed to exude pure sunlight.

“Oh no,” Alishia said.

“What?” Hope was hiding her eyes, and she glanced up at Alishia kneeling beside her.