Tim Lebbon: Dusk

“Spare some tellans,” the woman croaked, “we’ve not eaten for a week.”

Alishia could see the truth of the statement in the children’s eyes, and the lie in the woman’s.

“I’ll give the kids tellans,” she said, reaching into her backpack.

“They’re my kids.”

“All of them?”

The woman refused to look away. No shame. “Some of them.”

“I’ll give the kids tellans,” Alishia said again, and the woman nudged her aside with one fleshy elbow and continued on her way. As the line passed her by, Alishia rustled in her bag. She gave the last child-a pale-faced, sad-eyed boy-a sprinkle of silver tellan pieces. He smiled his thanks but it did not reach his eyes.

Alishia stood in the shadow of an abandoned shop and watched the straggly line disappear around the corner. There were other people on the streets now, sleepwalking from buildings at the end of a day’s work, little to look forward to at home, even less in the bars, where all the talk would be of failing crops and how the tumblers in the hills were taking more children and elderly each month. There would be arguments between those who believed it was due to the carnivorous plants being more confident, and those who blamed the Cataclysmic War. That old war, ended long before anyone alive now had been born, had replaced the gods as the ultimate scapegoat.

Alishia believed both were true. One fed the other.

Bad days indeed.

ALISHIA SLEPT ABOVEa stable on the outskirts of the city. It was cheap for two reasons: first, the stink of horses was rank and the noises unpleasant; second, the nearer the edge of Noreela City, the more dangerous a place could be. There were stories of Noreelans being dragged from their beds by mountain bandits, raped and eaten, only their heads and feet remaining when they were discovered days later (the heads because they were full of impure thoughts; the feet because they had walked in shit). There were all manner of unpleasant stories abroad these days, but that did not necessarily make this one a lie. Alishia slept with a knife beneath her pillow.

Most mornings she was woken by the horses stirring and shitting and being fed by Erv, the stable lad who had more than once tried to force his way into her room. She would stir slowly, listening to Noreela City waking up around her, smelling breakfasts cooking on iron skillets in the streets, tasting the rankness of the stale food she’d eaten the night before. Erv would talk louder than he had to and exercise the horses below her window when she was dressing. She always kept her knife close at hand. Erv was a nice lad on the surface, but his eyes shone with lawlessness.

This morning, however, something else brought Alishia from dreams of a field sprouting rotten corpses. She was glad to be awake, but for an instant she thought she was still in her dream. She could smell the acidic scent of burning. There was shouting coming from an unknown distance, the meaning of words stolen by street corners. But panic in the voices could not be disguised.

Instinct told Alishia that it was still the early hours and yet she could see around her room. Her clothes were in a careless heap on her chair, like a figure collapsed from exhaustion. She stared at them and they moved.

Her hand slid under the pillow so quickly that she pricked her finger on her knife. She yelped and fell from the bed, never taking her eyes from the shape on the chair, pulling the blade from beneath the covers and cursing when they entangled her hand, panicking and twisting the blankets more, expecting at any second-

But they were only her clothes, and the illusion of movement was given by the flickering light outside. The shifting, wavering light of a fire. A very big fire.

Alishia rushed to the window, completely forgetting her nakedness and the possibility of Erv already being in the yard below. The city glowed in the night, lit from the center by a huge conflagration. It was not the location that convinced Alishia that it was the library. It was not even the disturbing events of yesterday. Ash revealed the unbearable truth. That, and the thousands of burning pages fluttering in the air like incandescent birds.

“No!” she said, instantly thinking of the man in red with the broken book beneath his arm. “Oh no!”

Outside, fire turned the nighttime streets to dusk. People bustled and hurried and there was a surreal, almost carnival atmosphere as Alishia pushed her way through the dawdlers and curious. Food vendors were hurrying toward the fire, pushing their carts before them, obviously anticipating a profitable day. Families were trailing along the streets, moving aside whenever a horse-drawn cart came by, babbling excitedly the nearer they came to the conflagration. Alishia tried not to cry, but the smoke stung her eyes, so at least she had an excuse. Her rough cloth dress itched and scratched where she sweated, perspiration dripping with her tears to the old stone streets of a city that had been neither kind nor cruel to her, merely indifferent.

It seemed that this night, that state of affairs had changed.

As she entered one of the east squares and fought her way through traders setting their market stalls for the day, a cry went up. “Fire!” someone shouted, others echoed it, and Alishia almost laughed out loud. The column of smoke already reached the heavens, flames licked and danced at its base and the stench of burning overrode even the warm tang of oiled spices and freshly squeezed rhellim. How could they only now acknowledge its existence? But then she saw the flaming stall in the corner of the square, and she understood. Before, the fire had little to do with them. A distraction, a novelty, something to chat about while they awaited their first customers of the day. Now it had touched one of them by sending down a flaming page from a book, kissing a stall-covering alight, seeding itself away from the library. The threat of it engulfing all of their lives became immediately apparent. A couple of the traders rushed to help the frantic owner haul what she could away from the voracious flames, but most merely tried to protect their own stalls. They threw buckets of water across the canopies, packed away stock, calming their mules as best they could.

More flaming confetti floated down from the sky. Some of the little fires had burnt themselves out before they hit the ground, but a few-those feasting on a particularly rich history text, perhaps, or those with several pages stuck together by time-blazed into whatever they touched.

A man bashed at his own head to put out the flames in his hair. A woman squatted and pissed on her burning furbat. Novelty mutated into panic as the whole city seemed to speed up. Where people had been walking they now ran, where they’d been running they were now sprinting, whether toward or away from the fire. Water carts careered through the streets. Barrels bumped and spilled their precious cargo back into the gutter, and by the time Alishia had run to the fire, there were already several wagons parked around the old, misshapen library building. Groups of sweating men and women swung buckets back and forth, fire glinting on their strained faces, skin seeming to stretch and redden even as they worked.

Hopeless, Alishia knew. All hopeless. There were a billion places for the flames to hide, and even if they did manage to douse the conflagration and drown it from the fabric of the building, the books would smolder and simmer inside, the fire biding its time, ready to leap out and finish the destruction as soon as their backs were turned.

Why she personified the blaze she could not guess. It scared her at first, giving it a soul, an aim, a cruelty that she could barely comprehend. But then she thought of the man in red as he had left her library, the broken book beneath his arm, the torn and tattered pages he had been sitting amongst when she crept between the stacks to spy upon him. Nothing, he had said, but he had been lying. He had found something. And once that something left the library with him, perhaps there was no reason to leave anything else behind.