He dipped down again and touched on Alishia’s mind, afraid of what he would find. As before, it was vast, and though he could not comprehend the scope of that mind, he could understand its emptiness. He drifted, passing through places where Alishia should have been. They were cold, and deep. He moved on toward the single light in the darkness, where he had touched on her consciousness back in the cave. As he drew near he heard her muttering.
Yes, yes, there’s plenty to see, plenty to know, and yes, yes, I want to.
He edged forward and touched on her mind.
What?
she said, startled.
Who? Has it gone, has it gone for good?
Whatever harmed you has gone.
Harmed? Killed! It slaughtered me.
Who were you talking to?
Made me empty! Everything I was is in tatters.
Alishia, I’m here to help you.
Trey edged himself forward, trying to sense just how much of the girl was left. This could have been madness, or an echo, or even the voice of her wraith, still connected to her dying body through disbelief and an unwillingness to let go.
There’s no help to be had,
she whispered, and then Trey felt a heavy darkness pressing in from all sides. Alishia did not withdraw; the darkness grew. And it pushed him out.
He was sent away, spinning, rolling through the distorted planes of awareness that the fledge had opened up. He steadied himself and drifted past Kosar, past the witch with her scheming stew of thoughts. The closer he came to Rafe, the clearer the boy’s face became, until Trey’s mind reached out and touched on something beyond comprehension. So much space in there. So many places to hide.
Reeling, Trey guided his mind across the hillside and down toward the village in the distance. He was glad to be away from Alishia and Rafe—such strangeness hurt him—and he saw the gray-blue of sky and the green smudge of the grasslands, and little else. His mind was soft and blurred. Small rocky outcroppings were lost. Clouds became shadows. Here and there living things passed by beneath him, and he was angry that he could not discern them more clearly.
Solidness suddenly disappeared beneath him and the ground was moving, flowing, carrying a million mixed sensations. The river. Trey followed its course, his knowledge of what was below him hazy at best. He passed by places where the river was interrupted, still blank areas like solid shadows compared to the fluid shades of the running water. He tried a mental blink to clear his vision but it was not sight that was affected, nor his ability to project himself.
Stale fledge,
he thought.
Growing staler.
This might be the last time he journeyed like this.
And then? What would the witch and the others do with him? Would they cast him aside with poor, flailing Alishia, submit them to the mercy of whatever place they happened to be at the time?
Trey dropped down closer to the river, and then sound and taste changed as he plunged in. The water around him was filled with life, so much more than the dead air above, and for a few seconds he reveled in its multitude. Still he could not truly see, touch, query the alien minds around him. But he was there with them, and for a while that was enough.
Then he rose again and moved quickly along the course of the river. He traveled in the wake of centuries, riding the ripples of the river’s changes of position over time. It had worn rock here, deposited silt there, shaped the floodplain to its own design, twisting over the space of thousands of years like a giant snake shifting its way from the mountains to the distant sea. Histories lay buried in its silty bed—dipping in, Trey sensed the troubled wraiths of the crew of a sunken barge, already rotted to little more than memories but still haunting the place of their demise—and its banks held more recent stories in their embrace. A buried body here; the prow of a smashed boat there.
He moved on. His vision did not improve, his senses remained vague, but he found that with effort he could still identify what he was seeing and sensing. His own intelligence filled in the gaps.
And then the blood.
The river turned red. The color was a brash blow against the sepia view he had grown used to so quickly. He rose quickly from the bloody waters, trying to look away but fascinated by the wash of red traveling against the flow. He drew in his questing thoughts, afraid of being seen, trapped and pulled down . . . and then the red coalesced into individual parts, and each part was a boat. He drew closer, hiding behind a fold in the plane of reality, and tried to see more clearly.
Each boat was small, topped with a grimy sail, moving across the water like a giant spider, paddles splashing down and hauling them against the flow. They moved fast and the rowers did not tire. They were dressed in red from head to foot.
Trey pulled up and away, fleeing from the river lest he be seen or sensed. These things were powerful, awful and terrifying, but he was sure they could not see as far as him. If they could he would feel them . . . their senses crawling across his mind, engulfing it in their rage.
Mage shit,
Trey thought as he shifted quickly back to his own body,
Mage shit, we don’t want to meet them.
“BOATS, FILLED WITH
Red Monks,” he said. Kosar and A’Meer frowned at him. Rafe sat a small distance away, watching him as he spoke, but saying and revealing nothing. His eyes—haunted and pained when they had first met—seemed to have settled into something stranger.
“How many boats?”
“Four or five,” Trey said. “Maybe twenty Monks in each. So
inhuman.
Men and women, but not all there. Like they’re stripped away to the bare bone, their souls . . . fractured. Flayed down to the basic. What
are
those things?”
“Things we don’t want to meet,” A’Meer said. “How far?”
Trey closed his eyes, trying to remember; not sure, but unwilling to reveal his uncertainty.
They need me,
he thought,
and I need them to need me.
“Not that close,” he said. “Misted by the distance. It’s difficult to judge; I’m not used to casting so far. Before a few days ago, I’d never been more than a couple of miles from home.”
“Never mind,” Kosar said. “At least—”
“Think,”
A’Meer hissed. “Give us a best guess! We can’t leave it to chance. Kosar and I barely fought off just
one
of those red fucks. We meet up with a hundred of them, the first thing I do is fall on my own sword, I swear. We need to know, Trey. We need to know how much time we have.”
He blinked at the short warrior woman. Her black hair was tied back from her pale face, her eyes were beautiful. She wore her weapon harnesses and sheaths like a second skin. He was not sure who scared him the most: the Red Monks, or A’Meer.
“Far enough,” he said, looking past A’Meer and down at the river in the distance. “We’ve got time. They’re moving quickly, but against the flow of the river. We have the horses.”
A’Meer spun away. “We leave now.”
“The rabbit you caught,” Hope said. “I was about to spice it.”
“Do it on the move,” A’Meer said.
“Bad,” Trey said. “I smell something bad about to happen.”
“The river’s not what we think,” a voice said, and they all turned to Rafe. He had barely spoken since the night before, seemingly content to let them guide the way, steer him forward and take control. “It’s much more temperamental than you imagine. It’s just as likely that it will bring the Monks to us as we’re crossing.”
“Your magic tells you this?” Kosar asked.
Rafe looked at the big thief, and for a brief instant Trey saw something flash across the boy’s face that made him look very old. Then he looked out across the plains. “It’s not
my
magic, Kosar. And no, it doesn’t tell me, it shows me.” He closed his eyes, but they sprang open again. “Look. It shows us already.”
As Trey turned to see what Rafe had seen, he heard Hope gasp: “You’re doing that?”
“The land’s doing it to itself,” Rafe said. “It’s all mixed up, it’s balance is going awry, has been for decades. Air frozen to glass, Kosar? Sinkholes, Trey? The land is eating itself, and we arrived here at just the wrong time.” He shook his head and looked down into his open hands, as if expecting to find himself holding something. “Whatever’s in me, it might already be too late.”
INSIDE, RAFE WAS
in turmoil. Like the river across the plains, he was battling against himself, feeling the old Rafe—confused, frightened, wanting nothing more than the peace to mourn his dead parents—trying to ignore the strangeness growing within. He could see it, sense it, taste its power and its need for him to nurture and understand. But he did not
want
it. He willed it away with every breath he took, but like his heartbeat it was always there in the background, whispering to him however hard he tried not to hear.
Such spaces opening up. Such pressure, so precious. And yet this most powerful entity was still much like a baby, needing him, body and mind and soul, to protect it until revelation.
Now it screamed.
“WHAT IN THE
name of all that’s fucking magic?” Hope whispered.
“Maybe,” Kosar said. “Maybe.” He reached out to touch A’Meer and found her hand outstretched, waiting for his.
Even from far away they could heard the noise. It came in at them across the plains, rolling like thunder, vibrating through the ground, grasses shimmering in waves as if struck by a sudden wind. Downriver from San, three miles distant from them, the river was in revolt. It looked like a liquid eruption, an explosion of water and spray that rose hundreds of steps into the air, fanned out into a mushroom shape and fell, constantly fed from the tumultuous river. Spray was caught in the high breeze: white where the water was fresh, a dirty red where it had plucked clay from the riverbed, spiky green where trees and shrubs had been ripped out and thrown downstream by the upheaval. The river burst its banks and coursed out onto the floodplain, shoving vegetation before it, mud, other things too small to make out.
“What’s happening?” Kosar said. Nobody answered because none of them knew.
The river flowing downstream past San continued to meet the watery explosion, feeding it like air feeds fire. Rainbows danced within the eruption’s destructive depths, shimmering left and right as the contours of the water mountain changed and shifted. Two rainbows, three, flirting with the water like butterflies. But there was no ceremony here, no one to impress; this was basic, elemental force unleashed, a thrashing power that was whipping out its frenzy on the river surrounding the lowlands.
Downriver, away from the chaos, Kosar noticed that water still seemed to flow along the riverbed. He thought the flow would have lessened, such was the amount being pumped into the air and across the plains, but it seemed full and flush, turbulence transmitted from upstream causing white breakers to batter the shores as far as he could see. Trees downstream started to tilt into the river, their roots exposed and pulled into the mire. But they did not float away. Instead, they bobbed into each other, rising and falling on the disturbed waters but not seeming to move apart from that. Motionless, as if the river was now a lake with no current or flow.
Birds were startled into the air—a flock of geese gobbled their way overhead—and he could see the darting shapes of animals fleeing toward them to seek the high hills. Some were small and he had no concerns about them, but there were a few larger shapes bounding from hedge to bush to copse, instinct still telling them to utilize cover even though their lives may be about to end.
What are they?
Kosar wondered. They looked big. Most were probably cattle kept by the villagers of San, but maybe there were wolves in there, and perhaps a foxlion or two. His hand stole to his sword, but the sheer power of what they were witnessing soon wiped any threat from his mind.
This is the power of nature gone bad,
he thought. And then he realized the truth and he knew that he was wrong. This was all-powerful, yes, but it was not nature, not as it should have been. Rivers in nature ran one way only.
“It’s turning,” he said to no one, but they all heard. “It’s flowing the opposite way. It’s like the land has tilted and the river’s changing direction.”
“It hurts,” Rafe muttered, and then he screamed:
“It hurts!”
Kosar turned and saw that the boy had gone to his knees. Hope was there to hold him, talk to him, but there was no comfort to be had.
“It’s flooding the plains,” A’Meer said.
The tumult in the river had lessened somewhat, but now a wave formed and began its journey back upstream. It growled by the banks, scouring them clear of vegetation, picking up boulders and rolling them along, and the roar was like the land screaming as it was cleaved in two. The wave was way beyond the normal confines of the river now, stretching out across the plains a mile wide and still growing. It rumbled, and the land before it cried as if knowing what was to come.
“San,” he said, and he remembered the faces of some of the people he had met. They would be different now, mouths opened in terror and eyes wide, too shocked for tears.
“It won’t take long,” A’Meer said, as if that could make everything better.
There was a relentless inevitability about the wave. It rolled upstream and over the small village of San. From this far away Kosar could make out little detail of San’s destruction, and for that he was glad. A few buildings broke upward, timbers thrusting at the sky, forced up by the deluge. Some of the fishing boats rode the wave for a few seconds before tumbling and being smashed into flotsam, still topping the wave but now in pieces. A couple of the jetties—their posts cast down into the riverbed years before the land had even heard of the Mages—rolled over and over, ripped out and were sent tumbling upstream away from the village.
Of the people from the village of San, he saw nothing.