Tim Lebbon - Dusk

The shade withdrew with something akin to fear. It was its first true emotion, and it was quite apt.

Time passed, though the shade did not know time. The places it skirted became warmer, the oceans more full of life, the sky lighter and more loaded with living things. Nothing saw it-there was nothing to sense-but the mood of wrongness at its passing sent a pod of blade whales on course for a distant beach, a giant hawk into sea-bound freefall, and the crew of a fishing boat into a murderous madness.

It moved on, listening for more whispers to carry back to its god.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

HOPE’S TATTOOS SEEMEDto reflect her mood. They emphasized the set of her face and now, as she spoke sadly of what was past, they drew down the corners of her mouth, painted themselves as deep creases around her eyes. They made her look very old.

The boy had not yet given her a satisfactory answer. Hers was the only one that made any sort of sense, crazy and terrifying though it may be. There were other ways she could check, but she was too terrified. If she looked and saw and it was true… then everything was ending. Ending, and beginning again.

This was the moment she had been living for.

“BUT I’M ONLYa farm boy,” Rafe said yet again, as if his insistence would make it so.

Hope shook her head in frustration, her spiked hair snapping at the air. “You’re impossible, that’s what you are!” She stood and went to pour them both some more water. Rafe was not sure quite what she meant.

He wanted to curl up and sleep. He may be in this strange place with this strange woman, but he was exhausted, physically and mentally, and sleep lured him as a welcome retreat. He might dream of his parents, but then he might not. And he hoped that if he did dream, then for a while they would still be alive. A million good memories awaited him in sleep.

“How do you explain what you’re hearing?” Hope asked yet again.

“I don’t know what I’m hearing! Just… things. Whispers. Words I don’t know. Other things.”

“What other things?” She gave him a glass of water. She’d asked him already, but she looked determined.

“Hope, I don’t know, I’ve told you. It’s like… have you ever tried to explain a dream? A really strange dream, one that makes perfect sense to you when you’re in it but once it’s over and you’re awake you can’t put it into words, can’t make sense of it, even to yourself?”

Hope stared at him, nodding.

“That’s what I hear. Stuff I can’t explain. But I don’t even understand it when I’m hearing it.”

“What you’re hearing,” Hope said, “is an ages-old language. Few alive now have spoken it, or if they have, then only to themselves. It’s the language of the land, Rafe. It’s the language of magic.”

“But what does that mean?” She had told him that several times now, old languages and words no longer spoken. But it made no sense. It did nothing to distract his mind from his parents’ deaths, nor explain them. He needed sleep.

Hope sighed, looked down at her hands. They twisted around each other as if trying to wring something out. She was a whore, she had told him. Those hands had done a lot.

“I’m older than I look, Rafe,” she said. “I’m a witch. I have ways and means to keep myself young.” She waved around at her room, adorned as it was with plants and roots and dead things hanging from the walls, shelves lined with old books, opaque containers scattered across every available surface, their contents hidden away. “And all my life I’ve been waiting for you.

“You must know of the magic, the old ways Noreela used to live before the Cataclysmic War? Better times. The world was at peace with itself, and as we took from nature, so it gave. All that was stolen away by the bastard Mages because of their greed and avarice, their pride in thinking they could usurp nature and make the world their own. And now, because of them, there’s no peace in the world, and the more we take the more the land dies.”

“My parents always told me there was more myth than truth in those stories.”

“Lots of myth, to be sure!” Hope agreed, laughing with little humor. “But lots of truth as well. Stories that big have plenty of both. You’ve not traveled the land, you’ve not seen how much it’s changing.”

“You’ve been waiting for me?” Rafe asked, his voice weak and vulnerable.

“My family have always been witches, Rafe, even before the Cataclysmic War. Back then, my grandmother’s grandmother’s mother used magic to help her heal, help her look after people. And since nature has taken magic back, my ancestors and I have used herbs and spices and potions, those things nature has left us with. And I’ve always, always believed that nature would forgive us one day. There’s a prophecy, uttered by a few, believed by fewer; it says that magic will come back, and it’ll be reborn in a child.”

“I’m not a child.”

“You’re an innocent. And your origins…?”

Rafe sipped the water and thought about the voices and sounds he sometimes heard, the way they seemed to know him so well, even though he could not understand them. And he thought of the day his parents had told him about when they found him, abandoned and alone on the hillside. “I know what you’re saying,” he said. “At least, I think so. I’m not sure. I’m so confused. I’m just a farm boy!”

“There are ways to know for sure,” Hope said, suddenly standing from her chair and reaching for Rafe.

He sat up and shuffled back on the bed. “What do you mean?”

“Your parents weren’t your blood parents, were they?” Hope stood with her arms outstretched, as if ready to catch him from a fall.

How does she know that? “How do you know?”

“Because they can’t have been.”

“Why?”

Hope came to him, smiling, but there was something behind the smile he did not like. Something old, and desperate.

“I can show you,” she said. “We can look together. You’re tired, Rafe. Look… watch… haven’t you ever wondered?” Hope reached for his shirt and he did not have the energy to draw back. He felt her sharp nails scratch at his stomach as she lifted his shirt, higher, and then she gasped and stared down at his stomach. “Haven’t you ever wondered?”

“What?” His voice came from a distance. He felt so sleepy.

“You have no navel,” Hope whispered. “It’s true. It’s you.” She looked at Rafe, and then smiled.

Something whispered to him, and Hope’s lips were not moving. He smelled grass in a wide, sun-kissed meadow, even though outside this room he could hear the sounds of hidden Pavisse going about its bleak business.

“You tired, farm boy?”

Rafe nodded, vision blurring as the room rocked him from side to side, and he could taste fresh mountain air taking the sting of Pavisse from his tongue.

Hope was whispering, but he no longer understood. He was listening to something else, something that welcomed him down into deep sleep with words beyond understanding. Behind it, comforting memories awaited him.

HOPE TOOK THEglass of water from the sleeping boy’s hand and emptied it into the drain. She was careful to wash the glass several times before replacing it on a shelf. A few sewer rats will be giddied this afternoon, she thought.

She sat for a while and watched the boy sleeping, staring at his bared stomach. Poor soul, he had been through so much, seeing his parents and friends slaughtered like that. He deserved a rest. Already his eyelids were twitching as he took brief respite from the ills of the world.

Hope was afraid. She had spent her life waiting for magic’s return. She called herself a witch, but one thing she had always craved was to actually live the life. She wanted to heal with magic, not herbs. She wanted to treat madness with a touch of her fingers and a few cooed words, not a mug of GG’s honey, which invariably would not work. And over the years, she had been searching.