Tim Lebbon - Dusk

“Dreaming of death and vengeance, Lenora?”

Lenora looked up and stared straight into Angel’s eyes. The Mage had crawled back along the hawk’s spine and now sat astride the root of its huge tail, her face a hand’s width from Lenora’s. Whatever time had done to her, she had now found the power to undo. She was beautiful. The might of new magic flickered behind her eyes, and its potential seemed to light her from within, brightening her skin against the dark skies she and S’Hivez had created.

Lenora tried to speak but found herself lost for words.

“Don’t worry,” Angel said. She drew closer still, until her blazing eyes were the whole world. “So am I.”

“Mistress…”

“I frighten you?” Angel raised an eyebrow.

Lenora could only nod.

“That’s only right. Fear is good, Lenora. You remember the first time I touched you, casting out your pain and driving away death on that burning ship? You were filled with fear then also, but it was fear of the Black. I saved you from death to serve me, and you’ve done so well ever since. But you’ve become casual about your fear, as S’Hivez and I have become blase about our desires. We’ve always wanted magic back with us, but maybe discomfort and pain grew to suit us better. Perhaps we became too used to life as outcasts.” The Mage looked off past Lenora, back the way they had come. “Do you think that’s true, Lenora?”

“No, Mistress. You’ve always been the Mages, with or without magic.”

Angel smiled, and Lenora felt an instant stab of jealousy-she was aware of how she looked with her bald head, scarred body and black teeth-but she cast that aside, shaking her head and silently vowing to serve, for as long as she was alive. And even beyond.

“Lenora,” Angel said, “you never have to lie to me. You’re almost one of us. You came with us out of Noreela three hundred years ago. You think the same way about this bastard place, and you want the same thing. So we’re almost the same… except that you don’t have this.” She reached out and touched Lenora’s forehead.

At first, the point of contact burned. And then the sensation changed from heat to one of intense cold, a chill that would freeze air and crack rock, and Lenora’s eyes closed to usher in whatever Angel was giving her.

There was one single image: the death of Noreela. Lenora viewed it at the speed of thought-north to south, east to west, passing over mountains and valleys and plains and finding the same stain on the landscape everywhere: destruction. A city lay in ruins, buildings burnt down and blackened, streets strewn with smoking corpses, waterways polluted with rancid flesh. Farms and villages were equally devastated, their inhabitants laid out in lines and fixed to the land by wooden spikes driven through their chests and stomachs. Some still moved, flapping useless limbs at Lenora as she flitted by above them. An army lay dead on a hillside, muddied armour already rusting beneath the blood that had been blasted and crushed from the thousands of corpses. Carrion creatures ate their fill. Horses wandered aimlessly, their riders taken down and killed, the creatures too tame to fend for themselves. A great river was home to a hundred boats, all of them sunk, all of them filled to their watery brims with naked corpses.

And elsewhere, away from the bodies and the signs of a lost war, Noreela itself was suffering greater traumas than ever. A whole mountain range swam in fire, only the highest peaks still visible above the rolling flames. On an endless plain to the south the ground was cracked open, but instead of fire and lava rising up, the land’s innards rolled out across the dying grass, giant coils of earth and stone hardening in the twilight and venting scampering things as big as the largest hawk. The air was turning to glass, the ground melting away, water bursting into flame… the whole of Noreela was in chaos, and at its center pulsed the sense of magic gone darker than ever before.

“There, at the hub,” Angel’s voice said, a commentary for the sights Lenora was seeing. “That’s us.” And Lenora saw. The passing visions slowed, settling toward a huge wound in the land. The wound bled. In the middle of this lake of blood, floating in a boat seemingly made from the bones of countless victims, two shadows stretched and flexed, ambiguous in their shape and yet so obvious in their ecstasy.

With Noreela like a rotting corpse around them, the Mages’ wraiths writhed forever in the luxury of vengeance found.

Angel removed her finger from Lenora’s head and leaned back, smiling.

“The future?” Lenora said. “Is that what I saw?”

“No one sees the future,” Angel said, shrugging. “I showed you what I want of the future: Noreela drowning in the blood of our retribution. And with your help, S’Hivez and I will make it so.”

“You know you have my loyalty, Mistress. The boy… he gave you the magic?”

“You know he did. Why else have you been cowering back here near the stinking arse of this flying monster?”

Lenora looked down, ashamed and still terrified. “I’m sorry.”

“If I were you, I’d be scared too. You have no idea of this power, Lenora! It’s like being dipped in molten metal. S’Hivez and I have been communing with shades all across Noreela, and those soulless things shunned by nature are working for us already. They eat the magic and spit it out; it’s like food to them. They’ll take the smaller places even without our help, because the fear of Noreela will be their ally. And I can see what’s happening, here and there, north and south, because the shades tell me! We know that the Monks are dead back in the valley, and the machines are still once more. We know that the Duke’s army is weak and formless in Long Marrakash. We know that night is here for Noreela, and it is on our side. I can step from one side of the land to the other simply by closing my eyes.”

Lenora nodded, finding herself unable to speak again. The energy came off Angel in waves, like gusts of heat melting through her skin and flesh. She felt the whole of Noreela pivoting on every utterance from her Mistress.

“Our army is yours,” Angel said. “When it lands at Conbarma, you will be there to welcome it in, arm it, equip it with the greatest weapons we can make. And then you will take control of Noreela.”

“You’re leaving?”

Angel nodded, then turned to crawl back along the hawk.

“But where are you going?”

Angel glanced back. “You question me?”

Lenora looked away, shaking her head. “Of course not.”

Angel laughed, as if dismissing Lenora’s question. But she said no more, and left Lenora wondering what the next few days would bring.

War, for certain. More bloodshed and death than she had ever imagined. But with the Mages apparently intending to leave the Krote army to its own devices, Lenora found doubt stoking her fear.

LENORA SOON LOSTtrack of time. She found the consistent twilight unsettling, as if some angry god had taken a brush to the sky and wiped it from existence. To begin with, when the Mages cursed the dawn away, she had been able to keep pace with the time as it drifted by. But as that day passed and they flew on into the steady night, her mind had become confused. She found herself glancing around to the west, hoping to see the smudge of a bloodred sunset, but there was only twilight in that direction. As the Mages had taken daylight from the world, so too had they removed night, leaving the land perpetually between the two; no sun, no stars. Only the moons remained.

The life moon was a silvery disc, low down to the horizon in the east as if nervous at peering above the edge of the world. The death moon, bright and dusty yellow, rode high in the north. They flew toward it, and it seemed to leak some of its sickly hue across the landscape. There were those who believed that the moons were the remains of ancient gods, cast into the skies by a perpetual hatred and destined to gather as many souls to themselves as they could, in an eternal competition. The life moon was losing, and the death moon was yellow with the swelling of wraiths. Soon, the moon-followers believed, it would burst.