Tim Lebbon - Dusk

The Mage reached the broken ribs and launched itself out into the dark, open air, Rafe clasped to its chest. More light delved after them from the machine, and dozens of creatures fell, sputtering away into nothing like sparks from a campfire.

“Rafe!” Hope screamed.

Kosar sat up just as the male Mage ran past him. He kicked out but missed its ankles, and it sprinted on. It was waving its hands around its head, batting away a cloud of fluttering things formed of light that were sizzling and sparking across its skin. Screaming, it too jumped from the machine and out into darkness.

Behind Hope’s wails and Trey’s wretched shouts, Kosar listened for the Mages’ falling screams. But he heard nothing. The only sound now was the whimper of their own hopelessness, and the soft, dejected ticking of the heated machine cooling down around them.

LENORA RODE AIRcurrents far below the flying machine. Her hawk was mortally wounded, but she kept it alive with a combination of promises whispered into its ears and pain delivered through her buried sword. The promises were of more pain, not deliverance. The hawk was a creature of instincts, and pain would always be its driver.

Angel’s hawk had already tumbled past her, dead, after she had forced it to bury itself in the machine’s underbelly. The other hawk was still up there somewhere, though she could no longer see its shape around the machine. It was dark down here, and the coolness of the night air stroked the open wounds on Lenora’s body.

It did not take long for Angel to come to her.

Lenora saw the plummeting shape and edged her hawk beneath it, catching Angel and the boy she carried in two of its great webbed tentacles. Seconds later S’Hivez struck the hawk’s back just behind Lenora, sending the creature into its final, fatal dive.

But there was no despair, no fear, no sense that doom was upon them. Because Angel held the boy across her lap like a newborn child, stroking his forehead, waiting for his eyes to open and lifting his hair with one long fingernail as if deciding where to cut. When Rafe’s eyes did open, Angel drew a knife and sawed off the top of his head. She buried her tongue in the boy’s exposed brain.

Mother! a voice said in Lenora’s mind, and there was recognition in that shade at last.

And in the Mage’s ancient eyes, Lenora saw the knowledge that they had won.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

THEY DRIFTED THROUGHthe night. A sliver of the life moon and the glorious death moon shone down on the battered machine, both mocking. Stars speckled the sky and added their luminescence. The machine hummed quietly beneath them, shivering occasionally as if damaged or cold. They headed south. Perhaps there was purpose, but more likely it was simply drifting, an aimlessness brought on by sudden, unexpected, impossible defeat.

The Mages had Rafe. The Mages had magic.

Kosar lay back with his eyes closed, thinking of that first day when the Monk had ridden into their village. Back then he had had no idea of the greater workings of things, and even now he understood so little. Everything they thought they knew was supposition, any decisions they had made based upon uncertain thoughts and Rafe’s occasional, mostly unhelpful ideas. Really, he wondered how any of them had ever believed that they stood a chance at all.

A’Meer had been confident and passionate about her cause. Poor, dead A’Meer. Kosar had loved her-he’d always known that really-but it was strange how it took her death to reveal within him the true strength of that love. There was a hole inside, a blackness darker than this night, and it had little to do with Rafe’s capture.

“What now?” he said quietly. Neither Trey nor Hope answered him. Alishia had fallen back to sleep, though color had bled back into her cheeks now, and in the darkness she seemed to smile. They had checked her over after the attack. She was growing physically smaller, younger, regressing into some sort of unnatural childhood, though none of them questioned how far this would go. Just more strangeness to live with. And in truth, only Trey really cared.

More time passed, and the machine bore them ever southward. They would reach Kang Kang soon, Kosar knew, but that did not concern him. He had been there before, and it would be no more dangerous than anywhere else now that the Mages had returned.

Myth, legend, stories to tell children by the camp light, old tales carved onto story-walls in the bigger towns and cities… and terrifying though the stories were, they were always safely harbored in history, cosseted away, buried as surely as the million that had died in that Cataclysmic War so long ago.

Myths were not supposed to return. Legends were never meant to come back to life.

Hope cried quietly in the night, her tears forming strange shapes on her tattoos, but Kosar felt in no mood to comfort her.

Trey sat next to Alishia, staring down at her but seeing something else entirely. Kosar could sense the pain and loss in the miner’s yellowed eyes.

Kosar stood slowly and walked to the edge of the machine, stretching up to look over the membrane between ribs, wondering whether anything had already begun down below.

The land was lost. The Mages had the fledgling magic in their hands, and whatever they did to Rafe to gain control of it-and that didn’t bear thinking about, not at all-it surely would not take long. Perhaps down was up already, and black was white, and life could easily swap places with death. With three centuries to plot their return, the Mages must surely know how revenge would be most effectively wrought.

“What now?” Kosar said again.

“Now Noreela ends,” Trey said. “Everything that happened no longer matters. I almost envy my family and friends, dead down there from the Nax. At least they died at home. And here I am, a miner, flying toward my death high above the surface I never should have seen.”

“This can’t be it,” Kosar said, but he knew the childlike naivete of his words. “Hopeless,” he muttered.

“There’s something about her,” Hope said.

Kosar turned and saw the witch standing above Alishia. Her face was stern, molded by sorrow and anger. “What do you mean?”

“I mean apart from the obvious, the fact that she’s a girl instead of a woman now. However impossible that is, there’s something else. She’s not as ill as she was. She’s looking better. Less asleep. And for a while down there… just for a while… she was awake.”

“Meaning what?” Trey asked. He leaned in close across Alishia as if to protect her from the witch.

Hope stepped back. “We’re going somewhere,” she said. “Have neither of you thought of what’s happening here? The machine is still flying. Magic is still guiding us. Thief, you saw the machines in the valley falling still as soon as we left, their use ended. This flying machine… magic must know that it still has its use.”

“I don’t care,” Trey said. “We couldn’t keep the boy from the Mages, and the four of us will never get him back. That’s for certain.”

Hope looked at Kosar and smiled, shrugged. The expression did not sit well on her face and he turned away, perturbed. Was that hope he had seen there? Greed? Rage? He could not tell. Her tattoos had hidden her true feelings, as always, and she was as much an enigma to him now as ever.

“No matter,” Hope said. “Time will tell. We’ll be in Kang Kang soon.”

Their conversation ended there, and each of them withdrew into their own thoughts. Kosar sat back against a rib and nursed his wounded hand and bleeding fingers. He licked the blood from his fingertips, bearing the brief pain before the soothing sensation overcame them, just for a time. A’Meer had been able to soothe that pain. Sweet, mysterious A’Meer.