Tim Lebbon - Dusk

Eventually they halted to sleep. They were both cut and bruised from the last thousand steps, all of which had been uphill through a narrow, twisting seam. It had taken them four times as long as it should have, because Trey’s mother was exhausted beyond tears. Still she did not complain. Trey pulled her, she pushed, and they made it. But time was running out.

Once, halfway through this narrow and dangerous seam, they had heard a loud noise from far, far behind them. A scream or a cry. Pain, or anger. It had not been repeated.

Trey chewed on a fist of fledge as he drifted into a sleep bordering on unconsciousness. His mother sat beside him and whispered in his ear, motherly things that he would only remember much, much later. She stroked his cheek, ran her fingertips across his closed eyelids with the subtlety of a breath of air, and when she was sure he slept, she stood and walked away.

TREY WANDERED THEnearby caves in his sleep, his mind distanced from his body through the influence of fledge. He took some control-he knew what was happening-but he did not steer where he went. There was nobody to touch upon, nothing to find, so he drifted into one large cave, passed down into a deep, dark lake filled with unknown things, forced through a hundred steps of solid rock, found himself in a smaller cave… and suddenly there was someone there he knew.

His mother.

She had not taken fledge before sleep, he was sure, though he had hardly been in a state to know. This was really her, her bodily self, not just her wandering mind. She noticed him suddenly, spinning around and smiling as his presence made itself felt.

Son, she said, and invisibly he smiled back.

What are you doing here, Mother? How did you get here? It’s dangerous; you should be back with me.

I thought I should let you sleep. And I want to set you free.

What do you mean?

There’s a long way to go yet. Trey. Distances to travel, days to work through. And already I’m a hindrance.

Mother…

I’ve been topside, son. It’s a wonderful place. And hateful. Wide-open spaces, and terribly confined outlooks. The people up there are so different, remember that. Some will love you for who you are, and some will cut your throat for a fistful of fledge. There’s no finer sight than seeing the sun sink behind the hills, but as it leaves, danger arrives in its wake. It’s backward up there, Trey. They live in the light and find safety in it; it’s the darkness they fear.

Why?

Because they never know what’s in it. We thought we did once son. That’s what pride does. It blinds you better than the dark.

Come back now, Mother. I’ll wake. We should go.

I am going, Trey. I love you. I’m proud of you, so proud. But I’m old and weak, and… and I don’t want to be the cause of your death. She was crying now, really crying, and in his sleep Trey could almost hear her sobs echoing through the caves.

Mother, I don’t know what-

Don’t follow me, son. Follow yourself. Always.

Trey’s disembodied mind watched his mother tip sideways into a black maw, a hole with sharp edges that seemed to go down, down… She fell, and although he obeyed her last wish and did not send his mind to follow her, he sensed in her last moments an immense peace and conviction that she had done the right thing.

Seconds later, suddenly, she was gone.

Trey screamed himself awake. The sound terrified him-they had been almost silent for the entirety of their journey-and so he screamed some more. He thought he heard something answering from far away with a scream of its own making, but perhaps it was an echo already lost.

TREY WENT ON. He remembered only brief flashes of the remainder of his journey. He continued to lick moisture from walls or drink from underground streams. He ate moss and it started making him sick. He had to defecate every few hundred steps, feverish, dislocated, driven now by instinct alone. Images flashed in and out, places and smells and distant sounds, but he did not know whether they were true memories or imagined by his fledge-fueled mind. He saw an underground waterfall venting itself into a bottomless pothole, but its sound could have been the roar of a victorious Nax. He swiped with his disc-sword at something in the dark as it flapped in and bit him, slapped at his ears with leathery wings. He cried himself to sleep as the minds of the dead touched his own. He dreamed of Sonda.

Trey remembered reaching the rising. It was a great cavern carved out of the bowels of the world centuries ago by machines as large as the entombed Beast. Traces of them remained, littering the cavern’s perimeter, metallic ribs exposed and rotted with rust, old byways and hollows where something once existed now sad and vacant. In a pit in the center of the cave flickered the Eternal Flame of the underground, ever-lit to guide in miners with their cargos of fledge. It illuminated the whole cavern and blinded Trey, showing just how deserted that place was.

He had expected to find people here, but there was no one. Even Chartise, the Chief of the Rising, had vanished. But the rising still turned. A great construct of wood and steel, it was pushed by a team of fifty mules, each of them tethered in its own enclosure, each of them forever stepping forward to bite at the food that hung from a huge cogged wheel just above and ahead of them. And this wheel was slowly spun on its axis by the constant motion of the mules. If they stopped in unison they might never start again, but once the rising was begun they only halted when forced to do so. The construct kept turning, and the cogged wheels and giant oiled pulleys continued to lift the timber platforms up, up, topside. The rising was the closest thing there was in the mines to a living, working machine. The mules were its living part; the rising, adapted by Trey’s ancestors soon after the Cataclysmic War, the machine.

Trey should have been awed. This was beyond belief. But he was way past any outside influence, immersed as he was in a miasma of grief, sadness and terror. Every creak from the rising was the sound of the Nax bearing down on him, saving him as their final sacrificial victim because he had woken them, he had cast himself too far and disturbed them from their endless sleep…

Trey fell onto one of the moving platforms and was carried higher than he had ever been.

Time passed. He slept. He raved and raged. And even when he felt sunlight on his skin, helping hands shading his eyes and giving him water, hands that touched him and communicated along with the gentle voice as if their owner knew the language of the mines… even then, he did not believe that he had escaped.

The heat on his face married with the cool certainty that he never would.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

KOSAR THE THIEFhad not been to Pavisse for a long time.

He had been in Trengborne for most of the three years since he had been caught and punished, and that slowing down of life had suited him. He had been a traveler for most of his fifty years. He had seen many things, and stolen more than a few of them. That little, unassuming farming village had quickly become a sort of home, and he had barely strayed beyond its borders in all that time. There had been those there that shunned him because of his scars, but a greater number accepted him, though grudgingly. And it was the first place where he had felt accepted since he was a child.

His long career as a thief had come to an end far to the north in Long Marrakash, stealing furbats from a caravan of rovers. It had been a foolish, clumsy endeavor, and pointless. There were a glut of the unfortunate creatures for sale in stalls and shops all across Long Marrakash, and any of them would have been easier to rob than the rovers. But he had followed the caravan for two days, staying up in the hills as they traced the Long River along the valley bottom. There were maybe fifty rovers with two dozen wagons, horses, a herd of sheebok and a hundred furbats flapping in their cages. As each hour passed, Kosar became more and more certain that it was folly to steal from these people. Rovers were not renowned for their charity at the best of times-they had a law and a religion of their own, both actively excluding outsiders-and to steal from them was madness.