Tim Lebbon - Dusk

He drifted to sleep reliving images from the past, but time treated them differently. He fought the Monk in the village instead of hiding away. He refused to help A’Meer and fled north to the Cantrass Plains. Rafe drowned crossing the San, their journey ended by the wretched faults in nature, not by those that had caused those faults in the first place. And each dream fed into the next with the same sense of incompletion.

WHEN KOSAR WOKEup it was still dark. He saw Trey and Hope standing at the far edge of the machine, staring out through the tattered hole in the ribs.

“How long have I been asleep?” he said. “Feels like hours.”

“It was,” Trey said. “Ten, eleven hours.”

“It should be dawn.” Kosar looked out through the ribs and saw the dark ridges of Kang Kang to the south, their pinnacles biting at the moonlit sky. Then east, out toward New Shanti, where the sun was not.

“It should be,” Hope said, “but it isn’t. No sun today, Kosar. There’ll be no sun today.”

He shook his head, not understanding. Above the eastern horizon there was only a sad smudge, like the memory of life reflected in a pale corpse’s eyes. The rest of the sky was the same sickly hue, redolent of the death moon at its brightest. Kosar held up his hand-he could see the shape, but no real color. He could feel the moonlight on his skin, but there was no warmth.

“I don’t understand.”

“The Mages have made their first move,” Hope said. “What are we, any of us, without daylight?”

THE MACHINE, BORNEby magic, drifted south, edging closer to the peaks of darkest Kang Kang. While Kosar, Hope and Trey watched for a dawn that would not arrive, Alishia slept behind them.

And she dreamed.

Such dark, fearsome dreams.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

Tim Lebbon lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include Face, The Nature of Balance, Changing of Faces, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Dead Man’s Hand, Pieces of Hate, Fears Unnamed, White and Other Tales of Ruin, Desolation and Berserk. Future publications include Hellboy: Unnatural Selection from Simon amp; Schuster, and more books with Cemetery Dance, Leisure, Night Shade Books and Necessary Evil Press, among others. He has won two British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Tombstone Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. Several of his novels and novellas are currently under option.

Visit Tim’s website at www.timlebbon.net.

Visit the dedicated website for Dusk and Dawn at www.noreela.com.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

Mesmer

The Nature of Balance

Hush (with Gavin Williams)

Face

Until She Sleeps

Desolation

Berserk

White

Naming of Parts

Changing of Faces

Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark)

Dead Man’s Hand

Pieces of Hate

Faith in the Flesh

As the Sun Goes Down

White and Other Tales of Ruin

Fears Unnamed

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

Be sure not to miss the stunning sequel to DUSK

by Tim Lebbon

Coming in Spring 2007

Here’s a special preview…

Coming in Spring 2007

FLYING HIGH ABOVENoreela, it was easy to believe that the world had ended again.

The evidence of scattered, scared communities lay spread out below: small villages, a few larger towns, all of them lighting fires against the darkness that should not be. Ten thousand faces would be searching for the sun but seeing only this unnatural dusk, and Lenora wondered what they would think were they to see the hawk. Would they know? Would they have any inkling of who or what they were looking at?

Probably not. But soon that would change.

For most of the night Lenora had been trying to hide from the two Mages. She sat motionless and silent, as far back on the hawk’s tail as she could go without falling off, two short swords buried deep in the creature’s hide to provide precious handholds, and watched her masters with a sense of fear the likes of which she had never felt before. The Mages had changed so much, and they were strangers to her now.

For the past three hundred years Angel and S’Hivez had been bitter, angry and mad, given to lengthy musings on revenge and what it would mean to them. Lenora had served them and listened-their trusted lieutenant-but over time they had become shadows of themselves, bitter old things who showed only occasional flashes of their former brilliance and brutality. Ensconced in their mountain retreat on Dana’Man, they had been fading away, though they had still retained a certain power; things that had once ruled a land could never lose that. And Lenora had still feared them-the mad, sometimes beautiful Angel most of all. But their glories had been fading into the past, and the more time passed, the more her memories of them had been dictated by what they said rather than what she remembered. She had let the Mages’ power become a self-serving myth in her own mind, rather than preserving it as a rich memory. Time staled everything.

But now the Mages had made Time their own once more, and they were making fresh memories that Lenora would keep forever.

Angel still clasped the body of the farm boy to her chest, like a mother mourning her dead child. She had sawn off the top of his skull and eaten his brain, sharing it with her old lover S’Hivez, and then together they had opened the boy and sought something more nebulous within his flesh. From that moment, Lenora had felt the raw power surging from them, and they were true Mages for the first time in three hundred years. They had searched, moving bones and organs aside, and somewhere in there they had found what they were looking for.

They had seemed to grow, though their size never changed. They remained silent, contemplative, though everything suddenly seemed to flow through rather than around them. And later, when dawn should have been burning away the night, Angel and S’Hivez had laughed some curse at the sky and painted it dark with their victorious souls.

Angel had been holding the boy’s ruptured corpse ever since.

The hawk had died moments after they finished rooting through the boy’s insides, and Lenora thought they would fall. The great beast’s tentacles were flapping in the wind, its gas sacs deflating with a stench that almost made her pass out. But then S’Hivez had buried his arms in the creature’s neck, rooting around inside as he had probed the dead boy’s carcass. The fall had ended, the creature had risen again, and from then on the dead hawk bore them northward.

Going away, a voice said. Lenora looked around, squinting against the wind. She had heard that voice intermittently since the fight with the Monks and machines, and she knew what it was: her dead, unborn daughter’s shade still craving the unknown comfort of her mother’s arms. Lenora buried her face in the hawk’s stiffening hide and cried, tears tainted with anger. She lifted her head slightly and looked at them as they were caught on the wind and blown into Noreela’s skies. She hoped they would spread and fall with the next rains, casting her sorrow across plains and valleys, mountains and lakes, where vengeance would be waiting for her. They were a long way from Robenna now-and it was falling farther behind with every heartbeat-but now that she knew she would return, the heat of revenge was growing brighter within her.

The people of Robenna had driven her out, poisoned her and murdered her unborn child. Given time, their descendants would pay.