Tim Lebbon: Dusk

Already he could smell the town. A giddying mix of stenches wafted up from the valley, helped on its way by a steady breeze coming down from the north. Some he recognized: the warm smell of just-cooked bread, rich and comforting; horse crap sweating in the heat; freshly turned earth, either from the fledge and coal mines that honeycombed the hills, or the fields on the flood plains. Stale beer too, reaching him even this far out. How much spilled ale, he wondered, to make such a stink? He’d heard the tales of bar fights and muggings in gloomy byways, but Rafe had faced a greater danger today and survived. Drunken miners did little to scare him.

But there were other smells he could not identify, however hard he tried. A rich, acidic sting, vaguely earthy, that may be something to do with the mines. A perfume that reminded him of rot. And an odor that was undoubtedly food, but no food he had ever tasted. Spice-rich, hot, even the smell promised a tortured stomach.

This high up in the mountains the land was completely untamed, and Rafe had to move cautiously to avoid stepping in a hole and breaking his ankle. Rocks hid among the sparse, low heathers, ready to trip him and send him stumbling. Melt trace as well, low ridges of loose stones left here after the last Age of Ice, virtually untouched since then except by the seasonal caresses of nature itself. Some of them were obvious, dark lines of shadow twisting along the hillside. Others were hidden by shrubs or long grasses, like snakes awaiting a catch. These were more dangerous.

The life moon was out, lending a three-quarter light to his trek, affording him a silvery touch reserved only for the innocent and pure. But there were many definitions of pure, and Rafe suspected it was simply another legend left over from the time when magic was still alive. The sheen of moonlight on his skin gave him a sense of calm, because being good and pure was something his parents had so often told him was important. Wish for whatever you will, his father had said, but yearning is different from having. To have impurely is worse than never having at all.

Well, he still lived in Trengborne, or he had until hours ago. A nothing village, a poor farmers’ settlement inhabited by simple folk out to make their living day to day, hour to hour. A place where his future promised little more than scratching a living in the dirt, celebrating when a new calf was born, getting drunk on the autumn windfalls, marrying a village girl and raising children to run through the same ageless scenario…

Except that things had changed.

Not only now, when a change was thrust cruelly and bloodily upon him. But before, days and weeks ago, a hint that something was occurring in his mind over which he held no real control. Something involving words he could not understand, themes and ideas that should be painting a picture for him but which, in reality, were merely keeping him awake. Yet they formed a concerto of change in his mind, unleashing his hobbled imagination. However terrible things now were, this journey seemed right. Meant to be. His parents were dead and there was a black pit of mourning opening up inside of him, but things were going the way that was intended. He was certain of it. From the day he had first heard those voices, he had known that he was destined for more than a life of farming.

There was a noise behind him.

Rafe crouched down low, spun on his heels and rested a hand on the hilt of his knife. He caught his breath, wished he could still his heart to hear better.

The noise again, a scattering of tiny pebbles and loose stones slipping down the incline as someone or something made their way down from above. He concentrated in the dark, sweeping his head left and right in the hope that he would pick out something from the corner of his eye. The life moon revealed nothing. Whatever was up there knew he was looking and had hunkered down into another shadow.

But Rafe knew what it was. A demon, bleeding and moaning and coming for him on legs pierced by arrows and bolts. A man eager to complete the work he had so recently begun. The man in red, somehow still alive, colorless in the moonlight.

Rafe turned and slipped and went sliding down a patch of slick grass. He cried out, and there was another rattle of stones from above. He struggled to find his feet and slid down the hillside, digging his hands into the loamy ground and feeling his fingers slice through. He struck a rock. It opened a gash on his cheek and spilled warm blood across his face, but Rafe was glad. It made him feel alive. The pain invigorated him and drove him to his feet. Soon he was scampering down the hill, dodging rocks looming darkly from the night, hands held out to either side to afford him some balance and break his fall should he slip again.

He did not look back. To look back would be to invite the wrath of the thing pursuing him, give it an opportunity to hack and slice its way through his defense of pain and panic, cleave him in two from head to foot and let his insides cool here in the hills until the scavengers came. Instead he concentrated on the glittering spread of Pavisse, tinted silver by the life moon. And before long he was running like a mountain goat, leaping from hump to hump, missing the gullies in between that would bend and snap his legs, avoiding the rocks, their sharp edges promising to finish what the man in red had begun.

If there were noises of pursuit he did not hear them. There was no need to be silent now, and breath was punched from his lungs with every slap of his feet on the ground, every impact as he landed and sprang onward. Rafe’s mind seemed to retreat as he ran, revealing nothing of the passage of time, the shifting of night, nor the exhaustion he was forcing himself into. His body protected itself by driving him out of his mind.

By the time he reached the stone walls-the first touches of humanity since leaving his dead village-dawn had broken and spilled its glow along the valley. Rafe paused, hardly able to breathe, his heart hammering, his legs ready to fold beneath him. For the first time in hours he looked back, became aware once again. Shadows still hid beneath rocky overhangs higher up on the hillsides. He wondered what hid within them.

ON THE WAYinto Pavisse he passed by an old mine. Its throat was open to the air like a badly healed wound, the land around it scarred blank by dust, horses’ hooves, and the feet of the workmen who had lived and died hauling coal and fledge from the ground. To one side of the opening, overgrown and decayed down over the centuries since it had died, stood a machine. Its gray flanks of stone were supported by rusted veins of worked metal, and there were empty spaces where pieces of it had once been.

A machine! Rafe had only ever seen small ones, as big as his head or torso, their forgotten purposes only guessed at. But this one was huge, almost as large as the house he and his parents had lived in. Birds nested in its upper portions, and a soft breeze whistled through its long-petrified guts. Rafe wondered what its function had been, but the very idea of this massive, mysterious thing moving shocked and astounded him. His parents had told him that these things had not worked since the War, but that they had been here forever.

He passed the mine and approached Pavisse, and as he neared other people-and, he hoped, safety-the effects of the night truly began to weigh him down.

His parents’ blood was a crisp across his face. His own, still dripping from the cut, had dried over it.

Sometime during the night he had also soiled himself.

Crying, trying to shout but far too tired to do so, mumbling about his dead village and inviting curious stares from the waking population of Pavisse, Rafe entered the town to find his uncle.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk