Every movement now had the feeling of desperation. A’Meer’s departure gave Kosar the impression of a last-ditch attempt to give them more time, though for what none of them knew. Rafe’s imaginary destination, perhaps? The place where he could save them? For the first time ever, Kosar realized, they were actually submitting themselves to the safety and protection of this new magic brewing and hiding away inside the farm boy. It had revealed itself to them already, but unbidden, manifesting of its own volition rather than revealing itself at their request. Now they were going where Rafe said it urged him go, and with every step they took they went farther into the unknown.
He heard a scream from behind, high and filled with pain, and as it turned into an animal roar he knew it was a Monk. Another arrow found home, he thought with a smile, and then he frowned as he wondered just how many shafts A’Meer had left. Once she ran out she would resort to her crossbow, and then after that, the sword. By then she would be surrounded. And soon after that, she would be dead.
He followed the trail left by the two horses. He wished their track were not quite so apparent. He would have been able to follow far subtler signs, but as it stood, the Monks could not help but see the route they had taken. The forest carpet was churned up, twigs and branches broken, and here and there Kosar spotted smears of blood on the tips of thin branches, drips on the forest floor. Some of them were already attracting the ants.
He ran hard. He had never felt so exhausted. His heart pounded at his chest, trying to grab his attention. A pain bit into his hip, bending him to the left, but he never let up. To pause now would be to deny the advantage A’Meer had given him by staying behind.
More sounds came from somewhere behind him in the forest: a scream or a shout; something falling heavily, as if from an uppermost branch of the tallest tree; whisperings, urgent yet still secretive; and then the unmistakable sound of battle. Sword on sword. Shouts, grunts, screaming as sharp edges struck home.
Kosar paused, drew his sword and then ran on. A’Meer would not thank him if he returned to try to help. And really, what help could he offer?
From ahead came the sudden sound of a horse rearing up. Someone screamed, though he could not tell whether the voice was male or female. And then the horses were running again, their hooves drumming on harder-packed earth.
Kosar hurried on, ducking beneath branches, skirting around a huge writhing ant mound that had been smashed in two by the fleeing horses. And then he emerged suddenly from the pine forest into a deciduous woodland—the trees more widely spaced, the ground harder, shrubs and tangles of fern growing here and there—and he saw what had startled the horses.
All color had gone. The trees, leaves and trunks, the ground, ferns and shrubs and thorny bushes on the forest floor, the vines hanging from high branches . . . all color leeched away, leaving the whole landscape a uniform, dull gray. Texture and dimension were picked out only by the fall of sunlight, the distinction of shadows. A bird flew from one high branch to another, calling in a weak, croaky voice, and its color was the same.
Kosar gasped, paused, fell to his knees on the forest floor. The leaves there, left over from the previous winter, had taken on this sickly hue. The ants that crawled over and under the leaves were like speckles of ash migrating across the ground. A beetle here, something larger there—a scorpion, perhaps, or some huge insect—all tinted with shades of gray. He closed his eyes, held out his hand and opened them again. His skin was browned, leathery from the sun, his nails black with filth, and the blood that continued to drip from his fingertips was a stark red against this nothingness.
Kosar sighed with relief, stood and ran on. He felt like an invader here, unnatural and alien, whereas it was the place itself that was so wrong. There had been no fire. The leaves still seemed alive, and they even retained a healthy sheen viewed from certain angles, but something had stolen their color. He kicked the leaves at his feet, wondering whether color had been washed away into the ground, but only the compacted dark gray of the dried mud beneath revealed itself.
The trail was harder to follow in here—the trees grew farther apart and there were no broken branches to show the way, no churned ground—but he could hear the horse now, so he followed his ears instead of his eyes.
There were no longer any noises behind him. He was either too far away or the fighting had finished. He could not bear to imagine what that could mean.
At last he saw the horses ahead, swerving around a huge old tree, disappearing again behind foliage. He ran on, the sighting giving him extra strength for this final sprint. It took another hundred steps to catch up, during which the surroundings hardly changed at all: no color; no sound; no hint of pursuit. When he was finally close enough to make himself heard, he stopped and spoke as loudly as he dared.
“Trey!”
Trey’s horse skidded and reared slightly, snorting foam from its mouth and nose, and Trey turned in his saddle.
“Kosar! Where’s A’Meer?”
“Fighting the Monks,” he gasped. “Make Hope stop, just for a moment.” Trey nodded and rode on, trying to catch up with Hope and Rafe where they had moved ahead. Kosar looked around at the forest behind him before following at a trot. He found them waiting beside a fallen tree, the horses wide-eyed and snorting with panic and exhaustion. Hope looked pale and startled, her tattoos knotted around her eyes and mouth. Rafe’s expression was unreadable.
“The Monks are in the woods,” Kosar said. “A’Meer is trying to draw them off. Rafe, where are we going? Is this it?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “But I don’t think it’s very far.”
“What’s wrong with this place?” Hope asked. “What’s here?”
“Another bit of the land gone bad,” Kosar said, kicking at the gray leaves at his feet. They crackled and spun in the air, shedding gray dust like ash.
“Not that,” Hope said. “Back there, in the pines . . . those whispers. Did you . . . ?”
“Yes,” Kosar said, catching her eye and then looking away. “A’Meer knew of them.”
Trey made a noise—a laugh, a sob—but none of them said any more about what they had seen, felt or remembered.
“We really need to get wherever we’re going, Rafe,” Kosar said. “I don’t know how long A’Meer can fool them or hold them back.” They all looked uncomfortable at A’Meer’s actions, as if it was already certain that she had sacrificed herself for them.
“Not far,” Rafe said again.
“Swap with me,” Trey said. He carefully dismounted, letting Alishia slump forward in the saddle until her head was resting against the horse’s mane. “She screamed back there,” he said. “They got to her too, even deep down where she is. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” Kosar said. He mounted the horse, put his arms around Alishia and held the reins to either side of her. He glanced down at the miner and smiled. “I’ll take care of her,” he said. Trey frowned, smiled, plucked his disc-sword from his back and looked to Rafe and Hope for direction.
“That way,” Rafe pointed. “The woods stop very soon, and then we’ll see where we’re heading.”
“And where
is
that?” Kosar snapped. He surprised even himself with the anger in his voice. He was becoming furious at being led, steered, pointed left and right as if by a child playing with wooden toy machines, replaying their own versions of the Cataclysmic War. And though he was scared of what Rafe carried, he was angry also at being kept in the dark. “Where are you taking us, Rafe? Ask that thing inside you and—”
Rafe frowned. “A graveyard,” he said.
Filled with questions, none of them spoke.
Hope led off, driving the horse slightly slower than before. Panic was still there for all of them, but it was more controlled now, more ordered.
Kosar spurred his horse on, clasping the comatose girl between his arms. There was hardly any weight to her at all. He was surprised that she was not dead. He wondered what was going on inside her head, whether those whispering things had invaded as deep as her dreams, and he hoped that she was well.
Trey ran alongside, his long legs eating up the ground.
Ahead, Rafe rested his head against Hope’s back and seemed to sleep.
SOMETHING WAS COMING.
Rafe felt smaller, slighter and yet more significant than ever before. His whole body tingled, outside and in, and he felt the thing that lay deeper than his own mind expand to fill his soul, edges ripping and rippling, promising imminent release. He felt on the verge of a mental orgasm, a spewing of knowledge and magic and something new. He was sick and elated, terrified and enchanted; and the knowledge that something was ready to show itself drove his heart into a frenzy.
Still mindless, still needing protection and guidance, the magic inside was ready to emerge.
“It’s coming,” Rafe whispered, but in the tumult of the chase nobody heard. It did not matter. They would know soon enough. “It’s coming.”
Chapter 26
THE FLEETING SHAPE
emerged from behind a tree ahead of him, the air whispered and an arrow embedded itself in Lucien Malini’s neck.
He tried to scream past the wooden shaft, but blood bubbled in his throat and sprayed from his mouth. The agony was intense, its taste raw and satisfying, and as he fell to the forest floor Lucien’s rage closed around the pain and drew strength. His rage grew, making the pain a good thing, something he could subsist on even while his blood leaked and eventually clotted, thickened by fury, holding the arrow tight. He stood again, staggered sideways into a tree, screeched as the shaft struck the trunk and twisted in his flesh.
His skin burned, his scalp was tight and on fire, his muscles twitched and knotted with pent energy, and when he began to run his speed was borne of wrath.
Those dreams came again—images of people he had killed, women he had taken, the pathetic, quivering flesh-things that had died in their dozens on the end of his sword—and the whispers deep in his mind were confused, shocked and yet unable to let go. Lucien held them there. The images came faster, but rather than guilt and shame he felt only triumph.
He saw the Shantasi darting from behind a tree and roared his warning to the other Red Monks. The scream split the arrow shaft in his throat and sprayed bloody splinters at the pines. A flash of red to his right, a shimmer of movement to his left, and the Monks closed in.
His sword sang and vibrated with bloodlust. A squirrel jumped from a tree into his path, and Lucien struck out, slashing it in two. Another arrow whistled in, glancing from his cheek and taking a chunk of flesh as it spun away. Lucien laughed.
More memories, more deaths, dredged from the depths of his mind and forgotten merely because there were so many to remember.
There was a scream from ahead, the clash of sword on sword, the flash of sparks flying in the shade beneath the trees. Lucien coughed more blood and splinters and ran to join the fray.
“THE GRAVEYARD,” HOPE
said. “Oh Mage shit, I never in my life expected to really see this. I never
believed
it.”
But Rafe was leaning against her back, asleep or unconscious, and it was for her to make sense of what she saw. The other horse drew near and she heard Kosar gasp. Trey ran up between them, panting, his breath slowing as he looked at what lay before them.
They had left the gray forest several minutes before, and followed a gradual slope up to the crest of a small hill. Now, in a natural bowl in the land before them, lay the graveyard to which Rafe had brought them.
There were no markers here, no headstones or monuments or mausoleums to the hundreds of machines that lay dead in the heather and grass. Their hollowed carcasses almost covered the ground entirely, starting from a hundred steps down the hilltop from where the observers stood, sweeping into the craterlike valley and then climbing the slopes on all sides, here and there actually lying dead on the hills surrounding the hollow. Some looked as if they had been consumed by fire in their last moments, stony protrusions burned black and melted smooth by the heat. Others had died and rotted down slowly, settling into their final resting places as the living tissues that supported them slowly returned to dust. The smallest machine was as large as a man, its spindly iron legs rusted centuries ago into its final stance, and now almost rotted through by the trials of time and climate. Its shell held only air now, where before its workings had merged in metallic and biologic symphony. There were constructs the size of a horse, others even larger, and one, in the low center of the valley, that must have shaken the very ground it once rolled across. It was as large as a dozen farm wagons, its smooth stone shell curved and notched like the carapace of a giant beetle. Its back bore holes at regular intervals, and a few of them were surrounded by the bony stumps of what may once have been legs, or other less obvious limbs.
The land had continued to grow around this place of death and decay. Grasses grew strangely long and lush on the valley floor, fed perhaps by the water that must gather there from the rains. Bushes and small trees had forced their way between and through the dead machines, protruding from gaps in the constructs’ bony skeletons and metal cages, pressing through cracks where perhaps there should be none, doing their best to subsume these echoes from the past into this stranger, less happy present. Several large trees had sprouted here since the Cataclysmic War, their roots set deep, their boughs and trunks grown around or through dead things. One trunk had split in two and joined again, trapping within itself the rusting metal limb of a large handling device. It clasped the iron like a wound holds an arrow, and though sickened by the rusting metal its growth still seemed a success.
The shades of old machines—the grays of stone, blackened fire-stained limbs, the dark orange of rusting things—were complemented by the brave greenery of the plants trying to hide them from sight. Giant red poppies speckled the solidified hide of one machine like recent wounds. Yet the dead could never be truly hidden. They were too many, too large, and now a permanent part of the landscape.
“They came here to die,” Hope said.
“They’re
machines,
” Kosar said. “They must have been brought here. It’s a rubbish yard, not a graveyard. They’re machines, they were brought here . . . they can’t have come on their own.”
“Why not?” Trey asked. “It was ancient magic that made them, not people. Can we say what they could and couldn’t do?”
“They came here to die,” Hope said again. “Lost, knowing the Cataclysmic War was its end, magic brought them here to die.”
“However they got here,” Kosar said, “why has Rafe brought
us
here?”
“Maybe we can hide,” Trey said. “That huge one down there, it must have a whole network inside, plenty of places to crawl into and hide.”
“He said magic was going to make us believe,” Hope said. “There’s something else here, not just a hiding place. And the Monks would never give in. It may take them days, but they’d find us.”
“He also said that he might take us away,” Kosar said.
Hope turned in her saddle and nudged Rafe, almost smiling at how she was treating the carrier of new magic. “Wake up!” she said. “Rafe . . . farm boy . . . wake up!” He was not asleep. His breath was too fast for that, his eyes half-open, his hands clasped tight in his lap, so tight that a dribble of blood ran from his fist.
“We should get below the skyline,” Kosar said.
“Down there?” Trey asked.
“It’s where Rafe brought us,” Hope said. “And as you said, we can hide away in there while we’re waiting for . . . whatever.”
“But . . .” the miner began.
“It’s either down there, or back toward the forest,” Kosar said.
Hope glanced past the thief at the gray canopy. Farther back in the forest the gray changed to green, but from here the colorless blight looked huge, stretching as far as she could see from left to right, humps of gray trees retreating back into the woods. “A’Meer must be in there,” she muttered, wondering what might be occurring beneath those trees right now.
“She’ll find us,” Kosar said.
Hope looked at him and saw that he knew his lie.
They urged the horses down toward the graveyard of dead machines. Behind her Rafe mumbled something, but Hope could not make out the words. She nudged back sharply to try to wake him, but he merely held tighter and became looser, head lolling against her back, hands reaching around her waist.
Soon,
she thought.
He’ll show us soon. Soon we’ll know just what it is he has, and it’ll be our choice to have faith in it or not.
She looked out over the scattering of dead machines, relics from the last age of magic.
I want it so much, I’ve always had faith.
AS KOSAR LED
his horse past the first skeletal machine, he thought he heard something move. He paused, turned in the saddle, met Hope’s questioning gaze. Perhaps it had been Trey working his way ahead of them, stopping here and there to look into hollowed metallic guts, lift rusted blades, step over something long since sunken into the ground. The miner kept his disc-sword resting over one shoulder ready to swing, though at what Kosar could not guess. The Monks were behind them, fighting A’Meer in the woods. Here, for now, there were only old dead things to keep them company.
The urge to go back and help A’Meer was almost overwhelming. The cold way she had looked at him when she told him to go had been a mask. She had known that she was committing suicide, and that any acknowledgment that this was their final moment together would have changed her mind. She could have said good-bye, but that would have taken a second too long. She could have smiled and given thanks for their good times, but that would have been a breath too far. She had known that within hours or minutes of turning her back on Kosar, she would be no more. That certainty had left no room for sentimentality.
He could help. He could draw one or two of the Monks away from her, perhaps lose them in the woods, hide while they passed him by, double back and do the same again. There were huge old trees in there, trunks hollowed by rot; deep, dark banks of bushes; high ferns. A thousand hiding places, and other areas where he could lay false trails, snapping branches and then working back. Striving together he and A’Meer could confuse the Monks, and in that confusion perhaps find their escape.
It was a crazy idea, and he knew it. If he went back to the woods he would die with A’Meer. She was trained, her early years dedicated to preparing her for this one purpose. He was only a thief. Three minutes against a Red Monk and he would be dead. And knowledge of his death was the last thing he would want to accompany A’Meer into the Black.
“These are all different,” Trey said. “Inside and out, they’re all different. This one, here . . . I can see right inside, and it has dried veins or bones strung like strings across the spaces.” He ran to another machine, chopped at the overgrowing ferns and mosses with his disc-sword, smoothed his hand over its surface. “This one: there’s no opening, no way to see inside. Who knows what’s in there?” Moving on, chopping again, hauling on a bundle of thorny branches to expose what looked like a giant set of ribs. “This one, we can all see inside. We can all see those fossilized things.”
“Organs,” Kosar said. “They look like the insides of a living thing, grown hard.”
Trey reached in between the stony ribs with his disc-sword, touched one of the hardened things held in place by dozens of solidified stanchions, thick as his thumb. It exploded in a shower of grit and dust, the long rattling sounds indicating that there was much more of this machine buried deep down.
“I still can’t believe they came here on their own,” Kosar said.
“You’ve heard of the tumblers’ graveyards, haven’t you?” Hope asked. “They’re scattered around in the mountains, dozens all across Noreela. They’re guarded by other tumblers, but there are those that have got through to see for themselves. Thousands of tumblers . . . they go there to die, mummified in the heat, rotting in the rain, petrified in the cold.” She looked around at the partially hidden history they were now intruding upon. “Once, we thought that tumblers were only animals.”
“They’re not?” Trey asked.
“They’re not,” Kosar said, but he had no wish to continue the discussion. Trey turned away again, exploring, fascinated by this place.
“Is he doing anything?” Kosar asked, halting his horse so that Hope and Rafe could draw level.
The witch half turned in her saddle, reached around and supported Rafe with one arm. “Still asleep,” she said. “Or maybe unconscious. And . . . he’s hot. Mage shit, he’s
burning up
!”
“Let’s get him down,” Kosar said.
“But—”
“Hope, there’s no way we can hide in here. They’ll find us. And there’s nothing to fight with, if and when they . . . break through.” The thought of what “breaking through” meant for A’Meer did not bear dwelling upon.
“And now are you believing? Are you finding enough faith to put your well-being in his hands?”
Kosar shrugged. Rafe’s eyes were flickering, red from whatever fever had sprung up. He was nothing special to look at, yet everything was special about him. “It’s the last thing left to have faith in,” Kosar said.
A scream of agony came from over the hill in the direction of the woods, loud and anguished and rising in pitch.
Kosar shivered, his skin prickling all over, and he turned the horse around, ready to nudge Alishia off and gallop up the slope to the ridge. And what then? Down into the woods, sword drawn, ready to sacrifice himself to the Monks?
“Kosar,” Hope said. He looked at her, momentarily furious that she had drawn him back. “Kosar, help me with Rafe! He’s burning.”
Kosar steadied his horse and slipped from the saddle, easing Alishia down and laying her flat in the low ferns. She moaned slightly, eyes flickering, limbs twitching at the change of position.
Later,
he thought,
I’ll tend to you later.
Rafe was scorching. He grabbed the boy beneath the arms as Hope lowered him down and laid him out next to Alishia. Already the boy’s clothes were soaked through with sweat, his face beaded with moisture, and his skin seemed to radiate heat so violently that Kosar actually looked for flames, expecting the boy to ignite at any moment.
And why not?
he thought.
The magic within has to release itself at some point, once he’s served his purpose. Why not purge itself through fire?
“We need to cool him down,” Hope said. “Mage shit, I had medicines back home, things that would have helped.” She ripped at his clothes, loosing buttons and ties and exposing his chest and stomach, blowing on his slick skin to cool him. He started shivering instantly, so violently that his teeth chattered together.
“Is it happening now?” Kosar wondered aloud.
“Whatever, it had better happen soon. If he brought us here to show us some miracle, we’re in dire need of it. Look.” She nodded up the slope, Kosar looked, and there stood the first of the Red Monks.