Tim Lebbon: Dawn

The laughter extinguished the flames licking at the Mage’s eyes. Its tongue flipped out and lapped up the remaining fingers of fire. It ran its hands down the length of its burnt and disfigured body, and wherever they touched flesh was renewed. The Mage rebuilt itself touch by touch, and by the time it reached its eyes, Alishia was already turning away.

“There you are,” the Mage said, its feminine voice as out of place as a shadow inside fire. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. You-and this place-have taken alot of finding.”

Something struck Alishia from behind. She fell and rose again, and heard a scream as the ground rolled away beneath her.

HOPE REMAINED HUNKERED down beside the fallen tree. Dead beetles dusted her legs. The dried husks of wood slugs fluttered around her feet in the wafting heat from the blaze.

She hugged herself, trying to crush away her fear.

The Mage screamed again, a venting of rage and frustration that set Hope’s tattoos squirming and lifted every remaining hair on her head into a filthy halo. She wanted to scream herself, but that would give her away. And then she’ll be here, Hope thought, the Mage, that madwoman, and she’ll have me for her vengeance. So she bit into the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger, tasting blood and concentrating on the pain rather than the scream.

The tumbler had come in from nowhere and snatched Alishia away. Three more followed, the last one running across Hope’s foot. Its spikes and barbs missed her, its weight held up on other whiplike limbs. It had left her alone.

She bit harder and closed her eyes and the Mage shrieked one more time, the sound receding as she ran after the fleeing tumblers.

Hope risked a look. Alishia! The girl was visible, pressed onto the side of the lead tumbler, her loose dress flapping in the breeze as the thing bounded down the hillside and across the base of the valley.

Alishia, she’s gone, all that potential stolen away!

The girl spun around and around as the tumbler rolled, but it did not crush her into its hide.

Of all the ravages of fate, all the whispers in the Black, why this and why now?

The other three tumblers slowed as the female Mage ran after them with unnatural speed. Her hair streaked out behind her, yellow and beautiful, and her feet pounded clots of mud from the ground.

Because they’re trying to help?

Hope caught her breath and dropped her bleeding hand from her mouth. She closed her right eye and saw red through the left, as though viewing a cloud-streaked sunset. The Mage neared the first tumbler and it swung around, reversing almost instantaneously to come at her. She barely broke her stride. A stream of blue fire burst from her chest, coughed up and out with a sound that reverberated around the valley. The tumbler rolled away, on fire. It struck a tree and became entangled in the vines that drooped from the lower branches, and soon the tree was an inferno.

The tumbler carrying Alishia disappeared behind a swathe of thick smoke, and the Mage gave chase.

Hope looked back at the Womb of the Land. The cave entrance stood dark and indifferent within a wide expanse of burning debris. As smoke drifted toward the darkness it changed direction, blown left or right by the cave’s invisible exhalation.

Where is he? She remembered the male Mage from their fight aboard the flying machine, in those final moments when she had still believed that Rafe had a chance. Unlike the female Mage, he had worn his monstrosity with pride. “Where are you?” She scanned the remains of their giant machine, eyes chasing shadows thrown by the flames. “I could help them,” she whispered, testing the words in her mouth. She did not like them, nor what they intimated, but she had said and done many bad things in her life.

Nothing moved. Hope climbed over the fallen tree and started picking her way across the hillside, dodging the remains of the machine, stepping over a pool of jellied blood, skirting a scorched circle where something had melted into the ground.

Icouldhelp them, she thought. If it gave me what I want, I couldhelp them. She paused and looked to the sky. “But what in the Black would that make me?”

The voice that responded in her mind surprised Hope to a halt. A liar. The voice of her mother.

“There’s more to this than me,” Hope said, louder than she’d intended, and it was as if her words held the power to change.

Something else came into the valley, and initially Hope thought she was seeing reflections thrown onto drifting skeins of smoke. But then from the corner of her eye she made out bloody red smudges flitting through the air, drifting low to the ground as they made their way out of the darkness and into the light.

A shape appeared before Hope. It rose from a squat beside the entrance to the Womb’s cave: a ragged skeleton, unhindered by vanity or the need to reflesh its burnt self. The male Mage.

He roared a challenge, and the Nax flew directly at him.

WITH THE CONSTANT spinning, bumping movement of the tumbler, Alishia passed out. Her senses faded, though she was still aware of where she was and what was happening. She could smell no fire, yet still it burned. She could not hear the angered screeches of the Mage chasing her down the hillside, but she knew that she was there, reclothed in flesh and filled with more rage than ever before.

Alishia thought that the Shades might take this opportunity to talk to her, but the man did not appear. She searched for the library but she could not find her way.

Hold on tight, a voice said in her mind. The end is almost here, and we have what you need.

Who are you?

I was Flage. Now I’m one of many. And you are the hope we still have.

I don’t understand…

That doesn’t matter. Almost there. Hold tight. We have everything you need.

Tim Lebbon

Dawn

LENORA RODE THROUGH the battle, dealing death here, avoiding it there, and something was happening to her. An ache in her groin; a feeling in her long-barren womb that she had not felt since her dead child was born in Kang Kang’s foothills hundreds of miles to the west. It was a hollowness aching to be filled, and though she could not accept that feeling, neither could she deny it.

Mother, her daughter’s shade whispered, and Lenora asked, “Are you talking to me?”Mother, it said again, why do you deny me?

“I don’t deny you!” Lenora ducked below a hail of arrows and rode away, rather than taking on those who had fired them.

Then come for me.

“I always said I would, but I have something-”

Something to finish, the shade said. Mother…you have a part in its ending.

“I do!” Lenora threw a star and watched it slice through a Shantasi’s exposed throat. She felt nothing; no glee, no sorrow. Her machine seemed to be looking at her, but when she glanced down she could see nothing in its eyes.

Her womb ached with wanting, and Lenora shook her head, angry. “Onmy terms,” she said. She rode on, and her daughter whispered, and a sudden splash of blood across her chest made her retch.

WHEN THE MACHINES came, everything changed. Until then the Shantasi had been fighting well, cutting down the shambling dead and making sure they stayed down. It was demanding physically and mentally, but they were up to the task, and even Kosar had sensed a change in the Shantasi. Whereas before they had been resigned to defeat, they had now started to believe they stood a chance.

The machines and their Krote riders changed that. They stormed in from the north, still fending off a few rogue tumblers that had managed to avoid destruction, and when they hit the first lines of Shantasi they cut the warriors down almost without breaking their pace. The tumblers rolled at the machines and bounced away again. Shantasi darted left and right, using Pace to try to keep out of reach. And the lead machines drove on, bypassing the first of the Shantasi to fight those farther uphill.