Tim Lebbon - Dusk

Now she had found Rafe.

There had been hundreds of men in her bed, but few of them had she ever let sleep. They’d come in here drunk or lonely, had sex with her and then paid with talk: where they had been on their travels; who they had met; what they had seen. She had asked them whether they ever heard rumors from Kang Kang, and all but a few refused to even talk of that place. You think I’d ever go there? they would say. You think I’m mad? I don’t even listen to talk of the place, let alone think on it. Other things too. She would extract her payment through idle rumor, travelers’ gossip, whispers beneath the wind. It suited most of her customers fine, and many of them returned day after day, year after year. Sometimes, they had new tales to divulge. She was always searching for knowledge, picking through the lives of those sex-sated men for hidden truths and realities that would make no sense singly, yet considered as a whole might one day tell her what she had wanted to hear for so long: that magic was back in the land.

The boy mumbled in his sleep and Hope strained to listen, but he was talking Noreelan, nothing more.

She was breathing heavily, trying not to build her hopes on this lost lad’s fate. The world was getting harsher, and a slaughter in an insignificant little farming village was hardly news. But here she was now, staring at the living proof.

And now she knew: the whispers her mother and grandmother had carried down from their own ancestors, magicians and charlatans both, were all true. They were words she had never heard again, not all the times she had questioned those men, and she had begun to suspect that they were ideas open only to the women of the land. It was a female concept, after all. No man had an inkling of what the birth of a miracle could mean.

He’s heard the language of the land. He hears the whispers, he feels the movement of rivers through the soles of his feet, the breath of the world brushing against his skin. Don’t tease yourself, Hope! It isn’t so hard to believe.

She stood and turned away from Rafe, hearing him mumble again in his sleep. This time she could not make out the words.

Facing the walls of her little room, she took in everything that made her what she was today: a pretender; a charlatan; a profaner of magic. She had no magic yet she called herself “witch,” and some foolish people even went in fear of her. Old fears must run as deep as blood, she thought, and deeper than history. Here were a hundred spices and herbs and drugs known to anyone, and a few others unknown. Tumblespit, hedgehock, rutard, Duke’s Folly, stale fledge from several distinct regions, grass dew, hedge dew, rock dew, Willmott’s Nemesis, GG’s honey. A small earthpoison tree grew in the corner of her room, fed with the blood of rats. A selection of jars contained bodies and body parts from many creatures of Noreela, most known, some very rare, one or two little more than myth. There were lotions and potions whose uses even Hope had little concept of, handed down as they were from her mother, unopened all these years. Some of these jars had become opaque with time, and Hope had no idea what grew within.

And yet… no magic. Only tricks and turns, deceptions and delight in ruse. She could mix and match well after all these years, curing with products of the land and, if required, creating ills as well. She did a fair trade in her medicines, and earned even more from the occasional, more unpleasant commission. The sex, though, the whoring, that was where her true pay originated. The gathering of knowledge, the search for a hint that magic had returned and things were about to change.

And now here was a boy asleep in her room, a boy who had apparently escaped the endless wrath of a Red Monk. A boy who heard unknown voices, felt unknowable sensations deep in his naive farmer’s mind. He could explain none of it, yet his exposed stomach explained it all.

Breathing heavily, Hope knelt before Rafe and started to undo his belt. He grumbled a little in his sleep and whispered something she did not understand. Her excitement grew. Words of old! she thought. She slipped his trousers down slowly, glancing at his pale limp cock.

He has no navel.

There could be other explanations. She had missed it, perhaps, or a trick was being played, a complex deception for the amusement of some of her regular customers, those of whom she always asked her questions, again and again as if they would suddenly remember.

But she looked again.

He has no navel!

“Mage shit, it’s really here.” The tattoos on Hope’s face were in flux, shifting and moving as her emotions swayed from fear to elation, delight to terror. Here was the living future, and the dead past. This boy was more myth than reality, a story so rare that she had never heard it told other than by her own mother and grandmother. Magic is destined to return, they had said, and it will be in a child unbirthed, offspring of the womb of the land in darkest Kang Kang. She had never truly understood what that meant, but now she was faced with the myth in the flesh.

For a few seconds Hope held her breath, terrified that Rafe would simply disappear. She had realized the impossibility of his being here; perhaps that knowledge would drive him away. But he remained, squirming on the bed and frowning as he tried to make sense of some deeply hidden dream, a recurring voice in his head that must be trying so hard to make itself known.

Hope held his cock and squeezed slightly, feeling it grow hard in her hand, the incredible heat as his blood coursed through his body, driven by the turmoil of his dreams and drawn to this point. When it was fully hard she stood and raised her skirts. She could take him inside her, have his seed, and what would that make her? A part of things? More than just a witch without magic, a fool mixing herbs and chanting mock hope back at herself? She waited for long seconds, poised, staring down at the boy’s face and seeing conflict etched there in his skin. Her own tattoos itched as she fought her own private battle.

She did not know what would happen, what she would gain, if she took him now. But she knew what she would lose: his trust.

She covered him up with a smooth furbat-skin blanket.

“Sleep easy,” she said. “Get what rest you can. Listen to the voices, but don’t let them frighten you.”

She looked at the paraphernalia of her life once again-all suddenly redundant, like so much medicine pumped into a dead person’s veins-and then sat back to watch Rafe sleep.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

IT DID NOTtake long for Alishia to decide to leave Noreela City.

With the library gone, she no longer had a job. She had saved a good hoard of tellans over the past few years, but in a city like Noreela she could not live on them forever. And besides, there was little for her there now. Her books were gone, burned to ash by the old madman, and it was as if their destruction had brought her back to the present. She began to see just how bad things were. Before, she had seen the city on her walks to and from the library, and that was all. Now, aimless and wandering, she had more of a chance to register what she saw, to actually be a part of things instead of being lost in the histories of her books. She felt vulnerable and alone. She felt unprotected. Erv, the stable lad, had become even more threatening, sensing her vulnerability and perhaps intending to prey upon it given the first opportunity.

Alishia had started carrying her knife in a sheath on her thigh, hidden by her dress. That single act of insecurity and fear had in itself persuaded her that her time in the city was at an end.

Besides, she was alone. Her parents had passed away when she was a teenager, leaving her a pile of books and living memories, but little else. These memories had kept her going while she made new ones of her own, and eventually she had found employ with the library. She had few friends, and certainly no one close. She had never been beyond the city walls, and only rarely even ventured outside her own district. Alishia lived in her head, exploring the realms of fantasy revealed by the books she read, the accounts of things near and far that were sometimes truth, sometimes fiction, and more often one disguised as the other. Her own private world was a rich one, yet she had hardly seen the real world at all.