Tim Lebbon - Dusk

The Monk struggled, thrashed and battered the thing that was holding it up. It was a demon flailing against the good, an horrendous vision of things unnatural and unwanted. But Rafe’s ongoing scream of rage piled more violence onto it, and the flexing metal arm smashed hard into the ground. There was a sound like a fistful of twigs being crushed, amplified a hundred times. This time the Monk did not even scream. The arm lifted it again-the Monk’s own arms still waving, but weakly now; legs dangling uselessly-wavered for a few seconds, flipped it over and crashed down again. The Monk’s head hit something solid beneath the pretty purple heathers. When the arm lifted once more, its skull was ruptured and leaking.

It bashed the corpse down another three times before dropping it into a growth of high ferns. It almost seemed to Kosar that the reanimated machine wanted to hide the awful sight from these terrified, amazed humans.

The small valley was filled with a few seconds of stunned silence. Rafe was calm again, as if sleeping, and the machine was completely still, as hidden away as it had been only moments before. The whole attack had taken less than a minute.

And then the noises began. Stealthy, secretive, rustling and whispering from the undergrowth, groans and squeals of metal and stone things moving after an age lying still. A bush shimmered here, grass shifted there, ferns waved at the sky and were then still again, a tree on the opposite slope seemed to bend at an impossible angle before springing back, shedding a shower of leaves.

Kosar tore his eyes away from the sight and hurried over to Rafe and Hope. “Is he awake?”

The witch shook her head. “Still unconscious. Calmer now, though.” She was staring past Kosar, past Trey. “Did you see? Do you know what that was?”

“A machine,” Kosar said.

“A living machine, moving and functioning!”

“They’re waking all around us,” Kosar said.

Hope looked down at Rafe, stroked his face, wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of her dress. “He’s saving us.”

“We’re not saved yet. And it’s not him. I think Rafe is farther from us than ever right now.” Kosar looked at Alishia where she lay nearby, struck by the similarity between the two unconscious people.

Hope’s eyes sparkled with life, her tattoos stretched her face into the sort of smile Kosar had never seen there before. It was not a pleasant image. She seemed on the verges of madness. “Maybe we can get out of this,” she said.

“Did you see how that thing crushed him?” Trey asked. “It took seconds. If more of those Monks find us here they won’t last long! We’ll be safe, we’ll be saved.”

“And what of A’Meer?” Kosar asked, hating the petulance in his voice but sick at the unfairness of it all. Had she sacrificed herself needlessly? “Is this magic so cruel? Does it kill its protectors that easily?”

“She did what she thought was best,” Hope said.

“Look!” Trey was pointing up at the ridge between the valley and the forest, where several figures had appeared. The Red Monks stood staring down into the valley, the breeze flapping their cloaks around them, and more were joining them all the time. Some were wounded, but most were not.

“She held them off for a while, at least,” Trey said.

“Damn it!”

“Kosar, she held them off. If that first one had come through any earlier maybe it would have reached us before we got here. We could be dead now, and it would have got to Rafe before the magic had a chance to start anything. Now… look around! She gave Rafe time. And it’s working for all of us.”

“We have no idea what’s happening here,” Kosar said. But he did not take his eyes from the Monks still appearing across the ridgeline above them. His sword throbbed in his hand and his heart beat fast, the need for action and revenge rich in his veins. There were so many of them here now, maybe thirty or more, that the idea of A’Meer still being alive somewhere in the forest was foolish in the extreme.

“So what do we do?” Trey said. “Do we just stay here, let them come?”

“What else can we do?” Kosar said.

Hope’s grin was still there, that mad grin. “Let them come and try to take the boy. They’ll see what it is they’re fighting. They’ll know the true power of what they hate.” She touched Rafe’s arm, muttered a few words beneath her breath and waved her other hand over the ground beside her. The smile slipped for a few seconds as whatever she was attempting seemed to fail. But then she looked up again and caught Kosar’s eye. “There’s plenty of time.”

Something rose out of a patch of ferns across the valley, lifting its head from the greenery like a huge snake looking for danger or prey. But this thing had no eyes, no ears, no mouth that Kosar could make out. It was dull black like polished stone. It rose to the height of a man and stayed there, solid, not swaying or shifting in the breeze. The Monks were watching too, some of them pointing, some of them waving their swords at this manifestation of all they hated. A’Meer had been cured and the flooded River San crossed, but here and now the magic was touching and changing the land, establishing itself in the arcane corpses of these old dead machines, moving out of wherever it had been hiding.

And here, facing it in this fledgling state, was the greatest force that existed to ensure its nonreturn. The Red Monks began to howl and screech, voices twisted into something monstrous. They waved their swords and cried out their defiance, anger and hate.

The thing across the valley did not move but was joined by other shifting shapes, several more columns rising around it and shimmering in the fading daylight. The surfaces of these new things seemed to flicker, moving like oil on water, colorless but constantly shifting and confounding to the eye.

“What are they?” Trey asked.

“More machines,” Hope said. “Rafe is raising us an army.”

“It’s not him,” Kosar said again. “He’s just a conduit. And is it only happening here, for us? And if that’s the case, what about when the magic is established back in the land?” He looked down at Rafe’s hands where they were still clenched into the ground beneath him. No sparks now, but the power beneath his skin was apparent, the channeling of magic through flesh and bone. “What happens to us then? To Rafe?”

“Why hate it after all that’s happened?” Hope asked, her amazement real enough.

Rafe opened his eyes.

Hope gasped and fell back. Kosar caught his breath. Rafe looked directly at Kosar, his smile tight and tired. “It is me,” he said. “It’s happening here so that I can protect us, but that’s all. Nothing else. Just… protection.” He looked at Hope. “So there’s no point trying anything like that again, witch.” And then his eyes closed, the smile faded and his skin turned pale and began to glisten with fresh sweat.

“He’s not that boy anymore!” Hope hissed, her eyes wide and scared.

“He hasn’t been just that boy for days,” Kosar said. “How can he be?” He knelt next to Rafe and felt his forehead. “He’s burning up again. Something’s going to happen.”

“Those Monks are coming!” Trey said.

Kosar stood and moved forward, putting himself between the Monks and Rafe. “They won’t stop,” he said. “While there’s one of them left that can crawl across a field of blades to get to Rafe, they won’t stop.” He looked back at Hope and Trey, glanced at Trey’s disc-sword, hefted his own weapon. “Don’t believe that this will be easy.”

Suddenly spooked, the two horses turned and darted away between the machines, heading for the other side of the valley. They took the saddles, bags and blankets with them. Kosar took one step in pursuit and then stopped, realizing instantly that it was hopeless.