Dawn (11 page)

And his mind when he breathed in the Janne pollen was a blank, devoid of life.

“He lied,” O’Gan said again, more to himself than the man.

“Forgive me,” the man said. He moved past O’Gan and hurried away.

There must be some of us left,
O’Gan thought.
An Elder Mystic, someone I can tell about the appearance of A’Meer. Someone who’ll know what that means, and what to do. Where to go.

A group of Shantasi warriors trotted past him heading north, going against the flow. Their long dark hair was tied, pale skin made paler by the poor light, and their extensive weaponry was worn so precisely that it made no sound.

“Good,” O’Gan said, and the last warrior in line turned to look at him. O’Gan saw terror in the woman’s eyes.

He walked on through the streets, looking for someone who could tell him what he had seen.

Chapter 5

FLAGE WAS BORN
over fifty years earlier, when he was twenty years old. When he died.

Only a privileged few can remember the moment of their birth. But perhaps such crushing exposure and agonizing animation is best left forgotten.

He retained a vivid memory of that birth and the moments that led to it. He was a rover, prowling the northern extremes of Kang Kang with his small rover band, always traveling east to west to make sure they kept Kang Kang to their left. Left was the evil side, right the good. If they turned around and headed east, Kang Kang would be to their right, and its neutral influence on their roving group would change without warning. Right would become wrong, and Flage had seen the results of rovers traveling in the opposite direction—the shattered wagons and the torn bodies, the strange sigils carved into murdered men’s chests and the insides of dead women’s thighs—and he had no wish to meet whatever had done that. Some said that Kang Kang was a mother with countless children, and each and every one of them served her without thought or question. They lived in the valleys of her flesh and the folds of her guts, and when called upon they emerged into the sunlight and made it their own. No one had ever seen these children of Kang Kang, so their appearance was conjecture and myth: the height of ten men, the girth of a horse, hands of stone and heads of bone, eyes lit by timeless fires from the roots of the mountains where dark things gathered around the meager light there was.

Every year, Flage heard fresh whispers of these demons, and each time their appearance was more terrifying than ever.

They had been roving and camping across the plains north of Kang Kang for a couple of years, gathering furbats from caves and canyons and milking them of their rhellim. Once every life moon, a group of rovers would travel north or west with the rhellim, trading with small farming communities or the larger villages around The Heights. They would return with food, drink and tellan coins, and news of the outside world that barely interested the rovers. Their lives were their own, and though they shared the landscape with others, that did not mean that there was any need to interact with greater Noreela. The land was dying, but they barely looked further than the next day.

When finally they reached the western extreme of Kang Kang there was an important choice to be made. They could turn north and head toward Lake Denyah and The Heights, perhaps adapting their trade on the way. Their chieftain had heard that there were still fodder being bred and eaten in the wild villages in and around The Heights, and he suggested that they could begin their own small business, breeding and selling these unfortunate beasts.
They can rove with us,
he said,
eating the best meat and roots, drinking the best mountain water, then when their time comes they’ll command a good price.

Flage and others objected.
They’re people,
he said.
They’re fodder,
the chieftain responded, and the rovers entered an argument that lasted two days and caused several vicious knife fights. Flage had escaped the violence, but spent several days afterward nursing a wounded woman. Shurl had gone against one of the biggest men in the group, throwing herself on him when he had called her a fodder-fucker, and in a drunken rage he had pulled a knife and lashed out. Shurl escaped that first attack, but drawing her own knife had been a mistake: the fight was made, the other rovers drew back and within a few heartbeats Shurl was writhing on the ground with the man’s knife stuck in her right thigh.

Flage helped her back to her wagon. When he drew out the knife, she screamed and held him around the neck. The wound bled profusely, and he had to press a bandage to it, pushing hard while Shurl strapped it around her leg. He kept the pressure on the wound, and now and then when Shurl moved he felt the soft hair between her legs brushing the back of his hand. He could feel the heat of her. Glancing up he caught her looking at him. She smiled, and he reached for the canteen of rhellim hanging from the cross support of her wagon.

Three evenings later the chieftain called another meeting to discuss where to go next. He urged caution and peace, saying that he had dispensed with the idea of becoming fodder farmers. But when he mentioned another alternative, a hush fell across the several hundred rovers. These people were rarely silent. They enjoyed music and talk, they loved and slept and danced in the open, they shared the most intimate aspects of their lives with everyone else in the band, and to be in the presence of so many silent rovers was an experience Flage would never forget. It made him want to scream at the life moon where it hung low in the north. But Shurl was holding his hand. He glanced at her, and she was serious and scared. Her eyes were wide. She too could barely believe what the chieftain was suggesting.

They could turn slowly southward, he said, passing between the mountain range’s westernmost hills and the sea, and then eventually turn east once again, keeping Kang Kang to their left as ever. That would take them south of the mountain range, into regions where no one had traveled before. That very fact should have inspired a sense of adventure in the assembled rovers—their life was after all one of exploration and travel—but instead, a palpable sense of fear embraced them. The silence was broken only by something calling far away, a soulful hoot from the mountains to the south.

The Blurring,
someone said.

The chieftain stood his ground.
No one has ever been there,
he said,
not even the ancient Voyagers. It’s called The Blurring because nobody knows what’s there. There are no maps of the land south of Kang Kang…there may be a whole new world down there! Kang Kang may merely be the gateway to places we can’t begin to imagine!

People
have
tried this before,
Flage said. He stood, shaking off Shurl’s grasping hand.
Travelers have gone down there and never come back. I don’t want to know why.

Maybe because they found somewhere better,
the chieftain said, sounding desperate.

The crowd started to murmur, then talk, then the shouting began again. Steel glinted in the darkness.

The chieftain screamed a halt, and the rovers calmed down.
Tomorrow,
he said.
In the light of day, when we can see Kang Kang and hear its reply to our ideas, we’ll put it to the vote.

Flage and Shurl walked away from the group, climbing a rise until they found a rocky overhang offering protection from the breeze and prying eyes. They sat close together, sharing warmth and sipping rhellim and rotwine, and when the fire of the drug reached their centers they tore at each other’s clothing and made love beneath the life moon.

Later, Flage was musing on the decision to be made the following day. He lay atop Shurl, still hard inside her, and she was smiling up at him when he died.

THE TUMBLER CAME
from nowhere. Flage was looking down into Shurl’s eyes as they changed from smiling to fearful. They turned dark as something smothered them with its huge shadow.

Tumbler!
she said.

Flage raised himself, still feeling Shurl’s muscles holding him within her, and then something landed on his back and crushed him. Their teeth cracked together. His nose broke against Shurl’s cheek. The heat of her flesh was suddenly so sweet and wonderful, and he would feel it forever, smell her musk and share his heat with her.

Then he felt thick, sharp spikes piercing his body.

There was no pain at first. He sensed his skin being pierced and the barbs driving in—his left heel, right thigh, right buttock, the small of his back, two more beneath each shoulder—and their invasion was cool and numb. The tumbler was twisting back and forth on his back, driving the barbs deeper and pressing him down onto Shurl. Her head had turned and she was screaming, but he could not hear her above his own shout of shock, fear and agony.

The pain came in a huge wave, rushing through his body from his feet, culminating in the back of his skull as he felt himself punctured there with one more barb. It drove in deep and fast, severing his spine and stealing away all sensation. His eyes went wide, his mouth drooped, and he watched Shurl fall away as the tumbler reared back and started to roll. Shurl disappeared beneath him. The peaks of Kang Kang fell away, the sky swung by above him and then the ground came up and punched him in the face. The tumbler moved on, crushing Flage’s body and driving its spears farther into flesh and bone.

Sight began to fade, and with every impact Flage became less of himself and more of the tumbler. Hearing was the final sense to leave. He heard his bones crunching as the tumbler rolled, a regular
crump, crump
as he was crushed again and again.

He was dying, but there was something waiting for him on the other side. He found it in his mind as his bodily functions ceased, leaving him as a broken hunk of meat on the tumbler’s outside. It was a presence that he should not know, but did. It was an oasis of safety that he was scared to accept, a welcoming warmth that tried to swathe his free-floating consciousness as he drew back toward a darkness that hung behind. He knew what that darkness was—the Black—and his wraith stood before it, bemused and scared.

We’ll chant you down,
the presence said, and he recognized it: a dozen wraiths, a hundred, all of them together and existing within the heart of this tumbler.
We’ll chant you down to us.

You can’t chant me down,
Flage said, and the act of talking without speaking drove him even closer to the darkness.

The wraiths started to hum, whisper and sing. He experienced the words and tunes without sensing them in any way. The music became a part of him as the countless wraiths sang, and he could not help but be drawn toward them and away from the dark.
But wraiths are sung into the Black.

This is so much better,
the presence said.

Dead, adrift, Flage let himself go free. And eventually—hours or years later—he was a part of the tumbler that had killed him.

FLAGE COULD STILL
remember his name, though he had long ago ceased thinking of himself as an individual. His wraith was part of the whole now, an element of the tumbler—one spark in the flame of consciousness that surrounded its original, strange mind like rings in a tree’s trunk. Before, life had been difficult. Since his death and welcoming into the tumbler, there had been no such anxieties. While its physical self took sustenance from the bodies speared onto its hide, its composite soul became stronger with every wraith gathered.

There were wraiths of people who had been alive long ago, but Flage was not interested in their stories. Here was important, and now was the time. And here and now Flage knew that something was wrong.

It was not fear, but a sense that the tumbler’s existence was about to change. Deep at its core, the root mind was troubled.

It had been into Kang Kang and beyond, existing south of that place for many years, when the call came for it to head north. Flage felt the call arrive, and it hurt. It struck the tumbler like a psychic scream. Its mind quivered and shook, and Flage and the others were flung outward by the force of the tumbler’s shock. All around him came murmuring and singing, the wraiths chanting themselves back down to peace.

When the mind finally settled, and the tumbler passed between an endless mountain and a bottomless ravine, its wraiths combined to form the question. And when the tumbler answered they fell silent for a while, existing and thinking more as individuals than they had for many years.
Something has changed,
the mind had said.
It has grown dark, and there’s danger again.

The wraiths echoed those words:
Something has changed…

Still the fear was held away, but there was something in the tumbler’s answer that set the wraiths on edge.