Tim Lebbon: Dusk

Kosar hid in the shadow of an overhanging rock on the valley slope, fascinated and terrified by what he was seeing. And seconds before he saw the Monk keel over and lie still at last, he caught sight of another shape beyond the village. It was on the facing hillside, so distant as to be little more than a speck moving on the gray rock face. Someone climbing quickly, fear urging them on. Another survivor.

Kosar wondered who it was. There were plenty down there he would never mourn, but there were also those that had shown him some measure of kindness. Looking at the sun bleeding down into the horizon, he knew that he had to find out. He would follow the survivor and perhaps they would share their stories.

Kosar was a branded thief who had lost the only place he had ever even thought of calling home. There was nothing better for him to do.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk

RAFE BABURN SAThuddled on the hillside and stared down at the ruin of his life.

He was shivering, though it was still warm. Sweat beaded his skin, and the setting sun was still strong enough to bake his scalp, yet he shook and shuddered like a sheebok pulled from a mountain stream. He tried to cry out but his voice had gone, eaten away by shock. His memory too, slaughtered as surely as those children on the bridge, the militia outside the whorehouse. And his parents.

His father, probably still clasping the rusty old crossbow he’d not had the chance to fire.

His mother…

But no, he would not think of that. He could not. He must think of something else, turn from the village and stare at a rock, wonder what it had seen in its long life, explore underneath to see if there were any secrets hidden-

She had run to his father where he lay bleeding on the stilted platform in front of their home. He was dead already, Rafe knew, but still his mother went to him, perhaps thinking that her love could mend all wounds. The sword whispered through the air and sang a song of violence as it buried itself in her chest. She fell with the sword still in her, and the killer, the murdering bastard, placed his red-booted foot on her breasts to lever the blade from bone and flesh.

Rafe had wanted to close his eyes. Hiding beneath the platform, dust showered down over his face. His father’s blood had already pattered onto his forehead and dripped into one eye, and now his mother’s blood was adding to it, urging him to drift away, forget what he had seen and never dream of it again. The blood was as warm as his parents’ hands on his forehead when he was having nightmares as a child. Or his father’s fingertips, massaging Rafe’s tense scalp when he had so recently woken from strange dreams, unknown voices still muttering inside his head.

But he had not been able to look away. He was afraid that if he closed his eyes, then the man in red- clicking and clacking as the arrows piercing his body knocked together-would find him. The murderer paused, standing with a foot at either side of Rafe’s dead mother, staring into the house. Rafe heard a sniff as he tested the air. He seemed undecided, unsure of whether or not to venture into the house or move on to the next. His decision was made for him when two screaming men charged onto the platform, attacking him with rusty swords.

The man had swatted them aside and opened them up as they fell to the ground. Several arrows whispered through the air and thudded into his chest and arms, and he left the platform to pursue the shooters.

Rafe had waited for a little while, terrified to move, listening to the sound of death around him. It shifted across the village, tagged onto the red-robed man like his own shadow and, when Rafe judged it to be sufficiently distant, he ran.

He had tried not to look at his parents. He could smell them as he scrambled from beneath the wooden platform and he could hear the drip, drip of blood as it ran between the boards. He did not want to see them lying there dead. He wanted to remember them as they had been, not as they now were.

But of course, he had looked anyway. Unable to help himself, he saw what was left of the man and woman who had taken him in and brought him up from childhood, and who had died so obviously trying to protect him. And as his eyes alighted on the bloody ruins, flies already finding the wounds, another of the strange voices twisted into his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and fisted his hands, desperate to drive it back whence it had come. But he did not know where this was or why it was, so he was all but powerless against the ripple of weird words echoing through his consciousness.

Then a scream had cut through the sound and banished it for a while. Another cry followed, closer this time, so Rafe turned and ran. Guilt pricked at his neck like the gaze of the dead. His parents lay there unburied, open to the world, offering themselves to the scavengers and carrion that would come wandering in from the fields and hillsides soon enough. But there was also something urging him on: the sight of his parents’ deaths seen between rough boards; the sound of the man’s sword as he twisted it from his mother’s cleft ribs; the knowledge that, by returning and offering himself up for the same fate, he would be betraying them in the worst possible way.

A dead thing is just that, his father had once told him. A dead thing is less than a rock in the fields. A rock has seen the past and will see the future; a dead thing will rot to nothing, go back to the earth and perhaps care for the next circle of planting and harvesting. It’s what the dead thing was that matters, not what it is now.

His parents were no longer there. They had gone to wherever the ideas of living things go when they die. Into memory, perhaps, or an afterlife, or simply into the Black to add themselves to history.

So he sat on the open hillside and shivered and shook as he viewed the village lying dead in the valley. Ten minutes ago the man in red had dragged himself across the bloodied ground, leaving a smear in the dust behind him. He looked like a porcupine slowly winding down, or a cactus given brief life. His robe was pinned even tighter by the arrows, soaked a darker red by his copious blood. Then he had stilled. He had not moved since.

Rafe wanted so much to go back and make sure the killer was dead. That he had been alive when he killed Rafe’s parents was impossible, of course, with so many arrows venting his blood. But now that the man in red was silent and still, Rafe wanted to make sure. And, perhaps, he wanted to exact some sort of useless revenge. Take a sword to the corpse. Spread him across the village to accompany the death he himself had meted out.

The teenager-barely a man, though he liked to think of himself as such, his parents’ blood drying to a crust on his cheeks and forehead-did the hardest thing he had ever done. He turned his back on his village and started climbing. Through the mountain passes and into the next valley lay Pavisse. His uncle Vance lived there, he would help. He would know what to do. And he was all that Rafe had left.

Almost blind with grief, Rafe stumbled upward. He was sobbing and crying, hearing the dying shriek of his mother with every step.

High above, skull ravens rode the thermals and stared down.

IT WAS WAYpast midnight by the time Rafe crested the mountain pass and started to make his way down into the next valley. Pavisse sat like a glinting gem in the distance, spread across the valley floor and creeping up its slopes where mines sank wounds deep into the land of Noreela’s skin. Fires flickered in the night, street lamps scored lines of light into the landscape, the bustling noise of the town reached him even this far up. He guessed it was still a few hours’ walk, but at least the lights would guide his way.

He had heard many stories about Pavisse but had never actually been there. They ranged from the gentle-but-firm advice of his mother to stay away (It’s a hole, Rafe, a pit full of everything that isn’t good in the land), to excited babbling amongst his friends about how there were naked women in the streets, warriors in the bars and an ancient wizard who had forgotten his own name living on the edge of town. But any past misgivings had been thrust aside by the deaths of his parents. Dangerous and unseemly Pavisse might be, but tonight it was safety, a light in the dark, a balm to Rafe’s grief. Something to aim for now that murder had made him aimless.