Tim Lebbon - Dusk

Kosar handed over a coin. “One for yourself,” he said, and he enjoyed the flash of gratitude in the barman’s eyes.

There was a sudden burst of laughter from a corner of the tavern, and Kosar spun around. How can they laugh, he thought, when Trengborne lies dead, massacred? How can they laugh like that? But of course they did not know, nobody knew other than himself and the boy Rafe Baburn. Kosar looked at the group with envy. Three men, three women, comfortable in one another’s company, casual with their affections, their conversation easy and light. If only he had so few concerns, and so many friends.

“I don’t suppose you know A’Meer Pott?” he asked the barman. “She’s a Shantasi, used to come here three years ago.”

“Still does,” the barman said. “In fact, she works for me now and then.”

Kosar frowned, trying not to imagine what that work entailed.

“Don’t worry, thief,” the big man said. “Not that sort of work. I leave that side of things to the Twitching Twat down the road. The Broken Arm is a place to rest the mind, not exercise the body. No, she collects glasses, works the bar, makes food sometimes if there’re those here who’ll buy it.”

“Will she be in today?”

“She should be, come sunfall. Nice one, A’Meer. Very knowledgeable. A real traveler, so she keeps telling us. Though the fact that she’s stayed here so long seems to mar that image a little.”

“She is a real traveler,” Kosar said, smiling at the memory of her telling those stories, the disbelief of people when she openly proved them as true. “But for a Shantasi, a few years is nothing. They live a long time.”

The barman leaned over the bar and motioned Kosar closer. “She once told me,” he whispered conspiratorially, “that she’s been right to the end of The Spine.”

Kosar nodded. “She told me that too.”

The barman frowned and stood back up, picking a jug from a hook to serve another customer. “The Spine has no end,” he said.

“That’s what we’re supposed to believe,” Kosar hefted his jug in a toast and then left the bar, searching for a free table, finding one beneath the wooden staircase that led up to another level of tables above. He sat there alone, looking around, blending in with little effort. He caught a few patrons’ eyes, but there was neither threat nor any real interest in their gaze. Most of them were here to forget old trouble, not make new.

The wood of the tabletop was scored with graffiti, some of it recent, much of it old, all of it telling a story. There were many names mentioned, most of them with some reference to the impressive or pitiable size or function of their sexual organs. Places were named too, often in childish bravado, like I went to Kang Kang and it stank of shit. And here and there were messages. Xel-meet me at Friar’s Bridge, sunfall, noonday-Yel. Kosar wondered if Xel and Yel had made the meeting, and why, and what had come of it. He wondered whether they were both still alive, and if not whether they had died happy. Death was free nowadays, handed out on a whim by militia and murderers alike. And Red Monks too. A Red Monk slaughtering a whole village.. .

He looked around the tavern and shivered. He had heard what the Red Monk asked the children on the bridge before he killed them: Where is Rafe Baburn? The only villager that madman had not killed was the one he was seeking. There was a message in that, more hidden than those carved into the oak of this tavern table, and yet far more important. For a Red Monk to be abroad, it meant only one thing: that magic was back in the land. And for the Monk to be seeking the boy Rafe…

He shook his head and took a huge swig of his ale. It truly was an Old Bastard, coursing into his stomach and blurring his vision within minutes. It had been a long time since he’d taken a drink like this-back in Trengborne he was lucky to be given a bottle of rancid rotwine-so he would have to be careful. He had no wish to greet A’Meer by sicking all over her.

Yet strong ale would not purge the fear that had been seeded in his mind. Kosar had never felt a terror like this. He had been afraid many times in his life-fearful for himself, and those he sometimes had cause to call his friends-but never terrified. Even when the rovers had tied him down and watched as a weasel nibbled at his thigh, he had been certain that he would survive. Perhaps it had been the cocky conviction of a younger man, someone who almost always got what he wanted by stealing it, but it had seen him through. This was different. Earlier fears had been based on knowable threats, the knife in this man’s hand, the whip in another, a herd of tumblers chasing him for a day and a night across the foothills of Kang Kang. Those threats were tactile, understandable. What he felt now was a terror of something transmuted into myth and legend. Secondhand, yes, but no less heartfelt for that.

During his travels Kosar had come to learn a little about magic, how it had once fused with the land, and the fact that it had stopped working when the two Mages misused it to their own ends. They had been expelled from Noreela at the end of the Cataclysmic War, driven north out of the land and into the unknown. Watching stations had been set up along The Spine-the series of islands extending into the seas north of Noreela-to warn of their approach, should they survive and seek revenge. But here rumor truly took control, because there were even more legends about The Spine than the deadly mountains of Kang Kang. The Spine is endless, and the Mages are still traveling its length. The Spine moves, shifting over centuries like Noreela’s giant tail, and should its tip ever touch wherever the Mages ended up, they and their armies will swarm back into Noreela, sporting fury nurtured over three centuries of banishment.

A’Meer truly had been along The Spine, and she had told Kosar the truth: it was far from endless. And the warning stations and islands, though most were still inhabited and functioning to some degree, were all but worthless.

Therein lay Kosar’s terror. Magic was back in the land. It had once served humanity well, maintaining the balance of nature and making known the language of the land. But the Mages, were they still alive, would have their ways and means to hear of it. The Red Monk-part of an order sworn to keep magic from the Mages, should it arise again-had been looking for Rafe Baburn.

Kosar the thief, whether he liked it or not, was involved.

A’MEER POTT HELDher age well. She had told Kosar that she was almost one hundred Noreelan years old, yet she still looked younger than him. She was short, her body lithe instead of thin, her long black hair locked into twin braids that fell to either side of her snow-white face. Such paleness emphasized everything about her features, from the deep, dark eyes to her pale red lips. As usual, she was dressed in black. He had heard the Shantasi described variously as walking corpses, living shades and angel messengers to the land, but Kosar had formed the opinion that they were a mixture of all three. Like Noreelans, the Shantasi trod a narrow path between jubilation and damnation.

He watched her enter the Broken Arm and smile at some of the patrons, exchange greetings with one or two. She drifted to the bar, and Kosar was pleased to see that she and the barman were friends. They seemed to talk trivialities for a few minutes as A’Meer slipped off her cloak and took a drink. The barman glanced across the tavern into Kosar’s shaded nook beneath the stairs once or twice, but Kosar shook his head, held a finger to his lip. Eventually A’Meer went about her business, and as he watched her move between tables collecting mugs, wiping down spilled beer and nattering with the customers, Kosar felt a deepening nostalgia for their time together.