Dawn (14 page)

She closed the book and shelved it again, moving farther down the staircase. She thought perhaps she was going deeper into her own mind, but at least the flames were only burning above her now. They were eating away at history, but something told her that the history that really mattered to her—the stories from the past that could help her future—were stored down here. She hoped that the staircase would not act as a chimney and suck the flames down.

There was another library. This one was in a cave rather than a building, its ceiling hanging with stalactites of ancient paper that had petrified into solid carvings. She saw forms that did not bear seeing, and shapes that hinted at more terrible things she could never know. She looked up, expecting floorboards, but the roof of the cave was impossibly lined with books. The floor too, row upon row of spines facing upward, and wherever she walked she heard the crackle of old bindings breaking beneath her feet.

She knew where she was going. The book she plucked from the wall was not as old as many of the others, but its spine was worn and the pages weathered as though it had been read thousands of times. She checked inside the front cover, but there was no marking to show that it had ever been taken from the library.

“That’s because this isn’t really a library,” Alishia said, and the books seemed to lean in disapprovingly.

She sat on a pile of books leaning against one wall and opened the new volume.
One Afternoon in Pavisse,
it was titled, and the first page told her about a witch called Hope who had stilled a man’s heart with a long, thin knife while he was rutting with her. The witch had smiled and welcomed the gush of blood across her chest. The description of his penis shriveling within her as he died was long and detailed, the sensations lovingly rendered in words. Alishia closed her eyes and turned a few more pages, reading again, seeing how the witch had eaten a meal from a plate resting on the cooling man’s back and then carefully used her fruit knife to carve away a tattoo that covered one side of his scalp. She would paste it to one of the small windows in the basement room to dry, and later she intended to sell it for information. There was no mention of the information the witch sought. The book ended with the witch preparing to dispose of the body.

Alishia slammed the book closed and reshelved it.
We’re in danger,
she thought.
She never was out for us; she’s only for herself. She’ll kill us as easily as that man, and cut out anything she needs.
She stood and walked to the other side of the room. She did not know which book she was looking for, but she
did
seem to know the ones to discard. She ran her fingers along many spines and received a rush of sensation. She felt disgust, fear and revulsion, and mixed in with that was a brief moment of ravenous hunger.
Just moments in her life, been and gone, done with now. No threat to us.
But they
were
a threat, she knew that, because every book in this new cavernous library told Alishia what a desperate woman Hope really was.

She plucked a book from the shelf without reading the spine. She remained standing this time, not wishing to settle down to view something from Hope’s life, but when she opened the book she realized that only the first page had been used. It was an illustration with a few notes beneath. The picture was of a spider, fat and orange, and the caption read
gravemaker spider.
Underneath, the words read:
stilled for now, numbed with hedgehock, but a pinch of salt will wake it.

Her book speaks volumes of danger,
Alishia thought. Then she said it as well, but smoke from the fire above had started to seep down the staircase, and her throat was dry and sore.

She ran back up to the main library and lost herself again amidst the towering stacks of books. There was more here that would help her, she knew, much more. All she had to do was find it.

KOSAR HAD SPENT
many of his younger years traveling across Noreela, working and stealing and living his life as he wished it to be lived. He had seen many worrying, wicked and strange things, and almost all of them had happened during the day. It seemed as if the rot setting into the land gave weirdness more audacity, so that it was no longer relegated to dark places. Daylight had slowly become an alien place.

The dark had always been simply another part of Noreela. Nothing fearful hid there, because it no longer needed to.

But now the constant twilight was squirming beneath his skin, setting him on edge and starting to affect his judgment.

To begin with he was certain that he was heading east, but as more time passed his doubt began to grow. The toothed shadow of Kang Kang silhouetted against the sky had faded over the horizon to his right, yet it still felt as though he was traveling in the wrong direction. He ignored the sensation initially, looking down at the ground before him and walking on. Then he started pausing, looking back the way he had come, wondering whether his senses had become so confused that he was actually walking exactly the wrong way.

The moons offered him no clues, and all certainty was fleeing him.

When he came to a copse of trees, he examined the trunks and exposed roots, looking for moss or sun bleaching so that he could tell direction. But the trees seemed to swim in his vision, swaying as though his eyes were watering. When he wiped his sleeves across his face and looked again, the trees had changed position. They hissed and spat.

He stood and backed away, looking up into their canopies. Leaves had shriveled and already started to drop, and the exposed branches looked like skeletal fingers reaching for the moons. They waved at the sky and groaned as they rubbed together, and Kosar turned and ran.

In his panic, he tripped and banged his head. He lay dazed for a few heartbeats, rolling onto his back and looking up at the blank, black sky. No stars with which to plot his position; no sun to chart his course; just a uniform darkness, so distant and yet so heavy and close that he felt it crushing him into the soft subsoil that was the skin of Noreela itself.

“Fuck!” Kosar leapt to his feet and drew his sword. “Fuck! Fuck!” Shouting scared him—the sound was loud across this silent landscape—but it also made him feel better. The blade could do nothing against darkness, but his words could penetrate the silence. He shouted again, mixed curses and pleas, and in the distance something crashed through some trees and bushes and took flight. He saw a shadow heading up into the sky, and though he did not know what it was, it did not frighten him. It was something of Noreela, not of the dark. It was just as afraid as he.

Kosar backed away from the trees and headed across the landscape again, wiping a dribble of blood from his temple. He touched it to the sword to sate the metal and resheathed it. It was A’Meer’s sword. It had seen some blood at his hand, but not much, and he wondered at its history. She had told him it was her father’s before her, but that was all. She had kept so much truth from him.

Going to New Shanti suddenly seemed a comforting idea. There he would see many more Shantasi, and he had no doubt that they would remind him of A’Meer. He remembered her pressing against him in a stranger’s house as a Red Monk passed by outside, the heat of her flesh on his, the fear transmitted through her body and breath.
She was a warrior, but she found it easy to rely on me.

He walked on. He wondered whether those strange trees had been turned that way by the Mages’ twisting of the new magic, or whether they were simply another factor of the land’s long decline. Or perhaps Kang Kang could affect the land even this far out. It was not a good place. He was shamefully pleased that he was not going there, but he pitied Trey, who had become as near to a friend as Kosar had ever had.

And Hope. The witch, the whore, someone Kosar had never trusted. She was going with them.

Hess was maybe a hundred miles from here. At a push he could walk it in two days—if there were no interruptions along the way—or he could try to find a village or farm and steal a horse. He touched his fingertips together, winced at the ever-present pain and wondered whether his stealing days were over.

SOMETIME LATER, KOSAR
realized that he was being followed.

He did not stop or glance back; the feeling was so intense that he did not want to give away the fact that he knew. He sped up slightly, but could hear nothing in pursuit. And yet his blind sense prickled: the hairs on his neck stood up and his balls tingled. His sword was a comfortable weight on his belt rather than an annoyance.
It’s tasted Monk blood,
he thought, but the idea of a Red Monk following him was not one he wished to entertain.

The landscape was becoming more hilly, bringing the horizon closer and providing more valleys and dips in which the darkness could hide. Moonlight still gave the land a monotone splash of weak illumination, but great lakes of darkness lay here and there, as though the light was not heavy enough to penetrate that deeply. There could be anything on the floors of these valleys. Perhaps they had been this dark for a long, long time. Where he could, Kosar decided to keep to the hills.

He climbed a long, slow incline, panting with the effort and realizing how hungry he was. He had a water pouch that was half full, but he had not thought about food for a while. He would have to stop soon and set some snares, maybe see if he could find some berries or roots to strip and eat. But the plants were dying. Leaves were shriveling and drying, and when he passed a clump of common black bushes there was an unpleasant odor underlying everything, as though the ground itself was slowly going to rot.
Maybe this is how it will end,
he thought.
Maybe the land will just fade away and die. It may take a year, but the Mages have been waiting three centuries for this. Less effort for them. And a weakening land would never fight back.

There was a sound behind him, a distant thud like something dropping to the ground. Kosar paused, head tilted to pick up anything else. He realized that anyone or anything watching would now know that he had heard them, but the pretense could do him no good. Perhaps whatever it was would not reveal itself.

Kosar held on to the sword and felt comforted at the way it fit his hand.

He carried on walking, reaching the top of the hill in one final hard climb. He was sweating and panting now, shaking with the exertion, but stopping for a rest would help bring his follower closer. He could smell rotting plants again, and to his left he saw the outline of a huge old machine rusting into the ground. Yellow moonlight from the death moon bathed its interior and made it more defined than anything Kosar had seen since darkness fell. He had often heard it said that the death moon favored the dead with its light.

He turned around and stared down the hill he had just climbed. For a few seconds he saw the shape way down the slope, struggling upward like a huge beetle. Then whoever or whatever it was must have seen him silhouetted against the moonlit sky, because the shadow grew still and merged with the ground.

“Come on!” Kosar shouted. “Don’t be a coward!”
Should be running, not shouting,
he thought, but terror had brought out a new bravery. If he was to confront whatever this was, he’d rather do it now than have it follow him at a distance. “Come
on
!” But the shadow remained hidden.

He looked across at the machine and considered hiding within its rusted embrace. But then he thought of those old machines rising to fight in the graveyard, the flesh and blood flowing to them from out of nowhere, and quickly moved on.