Kosar paused and looked ahead. The dusk hid much of the land and turned the rest a pale silver, light from the moons splashing in seemingly isolated patches. There were rolling hills and hidden valleys, a landscape of shadows and shaded peaks, home to anything from a man to a herd of tumblers. The Mages’ army could be hiding within five thousand steps of where he was, and he’d have no idea until he stumbled upon it. And with that thought came the very reason he should not head for New Shanti: the Shantasi were the only people likely to raise a serious defense against the Mages, and New Shanti would become a battleground.
Kosar glanced behind him but saw no signs of pursuit.
If he went due east, he would walk into New Shanti across the plains, arriving eventually at Hess, the Shantasi Mystic city. Even before he knew that she was a warrior, A’Meer had told him about her youth spent out on those plains, patrolling the approaches to New Shanti along with others of her age. It was a rite of passage, ten thousand young Shantasi at any one time complementing the Shantasi army that made the plain its home. It was their most vulnerable point, and much of the year she had spent there had been in training for possible attack from the rest of Noreela. Kosar had scoffed at such an idea, but A’Meer had been grim-faced and serious. “Do you have any idea of where the Shantasi come from?” she had asked. Kosar had shaken his head, still trying to maintain his smile but failing beneath A’Meer’s glare. “Slavery,” she had said, and his image of the thousands of Shantasi children camped across that plain suddenly changed. Freedom was a luxury with a price. The Shantasi paid for freedom with their childhood.
Later, A’Meer’s revelation of her true nature-as a Shantasi warrior sworn to find and protect fledgling magic-had altered Kosar’s perception of her people even more. Now he imagined them as a fiercely independent race, lost and yet making their home here, on Noreela, and willing to give so much for the ground they had. A’Meer, he supposed, had scared him.
So that way lay New Shanti, and plains swarming with Shantasi youths willing to prove themselves adults. Their chance would come soon, Kosar knew. The Mages would be forming their armies and preparing to march. War was the only certainty in Noreela’s future.
Kosar turned away, a sickness punching at his gut. It was shame and self-loathing, but it was also a delayed reaction to what had happened. Fear, biting deep. Guilt, sinking teeth into his insides. He knew that it would never let go. He could walk forever and pass through Kang Kang, into The Blurring that many said lay beyond, and perhaps he would even reach a southern coast that no one had ever seen…but guilt would still be there, turning in his gut like a constant sword. A’Meer had died protecting what she thought was right, and now he was running away to save his own skin.
“No!” he said. Yes. There’s nothing heroic here. Nothing symbolic. It’s cowardice. I can’t face the dark future with others, so I’m trying to do it on my own.
Trey and Hope think they have a chance to fight the future, A’Meer’s voice said.
“They know nothing,” Kosar said. It felt strange talking to the dark, but it acted like a mirror, turning his words back on himself. He was talking to his own shadow, berating a solitary shape that stood here in the darkness while Noreela prepared to crumble. He touched his sword and felt sick at the thought of violence. Didn’t he have the right to be scared? He was a marked thief, and his fingertips stung as he touched the sword’s handle. Any success he’d had fighting the Monks had been a reflection of A’Meer’s bravery, skill and determination. He was just a useless wanderer. A middle-aged waster who could not even steal anymore because of his brands. No one trusted him.
A’Meer did, A’Meer’s voice said. And Trey, and Alishia, and Rafe. As for Hope…that damn witch trusts no one but herself.
Kosar closed his eyes and squeezed his fists, grimacing at the pain from his fingers but hoping it would drive A’Meer’s voice from his head.
“I’m just hearing things,” he said.
And then the ground began to move, and he was seeing things as well.
To begin with, he thought he had something in his eye. He lifted his eyelid and blinked rapidly, trying to expunge the hazing from his vision. Then he closed his eyes, and when he looked again the same effect was there: a blurring of the ground around his feet, as though the grasses and stones had lost their sharp edges. The death moon yellowed the scene and gave the undefined ground a creamy texture, and Kosar suddenly felt sick from the sense of movement.
He fell to his knees and vomited, and when he opened his eyes the ground was alive. It stirred beneath him, parting around the warm puddle between his hands, undulating as though the ground itself had turned fluid. He stood quickly, and for a few seconds he could make out the shapes of his hands in the soil before the shifting surface moved in to cover them.
“Oh fuck,” he whispered, because now he knew what these things were, and he remembered the last time he had seen them. They had presented a warning then, forming themselves as Red Monks into which A’Meer had fired several useless arrows. These were mimics. Knowing them, Kosar felt a vast, alien intelligence focusing upon him.
He wanted to run, but he was afraid of stepping on the mimics. Would he hurt them? Would they translate his fear into aggression? He closed his eyes and heard them shifting through grasses, passing over fallen leaves, moving around and beneath small stones, sending up whispers that seemed to blur the air as their bodies blurred the ground. His stomach still churned. He wished A’Meer were here with him.
Kosar tried to perceive a pattern or meaning to their movement. He could make out no particular direction. It was as though each mimic acted independently, fulfilling its own aim. Whatever communication might pass amongst them seemed to dictate no combined purpose. He wondered if they were eating or sleeping, talking or conspiring, and then the ground broke before him and a shape began to rise.
It formed so quickly that it was fully there before he had time to truly comprehend what he was seeing.
A’Meer stood before him. But this was not A’Meer as he had ever seen her. There was no smile on her pale face, no mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes, no sign that she saw or heard or recognized anything. The mimics had formed her upright, but this A’Meer was dead. Kosar had no doubt about that: her legs were gashed, her stomach and chest a mess of protruding flesh and bone, her throat gaping like a screaming mouth. Even her head was cleaved down to between her eyes. He could see her shattered skull and exposed brain. The mimics were meticulous in their detail. This was A’Meer as they had last seen her, lying dead back in the Gray Woods while he was probably still running up the slope to the machines’ graveyard. They had seen blood pulsing from her throat, and they copied that action now. They had seen her right eye ruptured and leaking onto her cheek, and that image repeated itself here. She was dead, his beloved A’Meer…and yet her mouth moved, as though she were trying to inhale one last time, or expel one final word.
“A’Meer,” Kosar whispered, though he knew it was not her. Still, seeing that image, her death hit home like never before, and Kosar started crying. Tears blurred the vision, and then the scene distorted some more as A’Meer came apart before him-flesh flowing, bone melting away-and sank back into the uniform mass of mimics shifting across the ground.
Kosar tried talking to them, asking what they wanted and why they had shown him this, but the mimics suddenly flowed to the east as fast as a man could run. The movement upset his senses and sent him tumbling to his left. He fell, rolled, and when he looked down, the ground was itself again. The mimics whispered away.
“A’Meer,” he said again, but no more thoughts were spoken in her voice.
Yet as the impact of viewing her death hit home, Kosar began to wonder what message the mimics had been trying to convey. By showing him a vision of A’Meer, what could they possibly have been trying to communicate? And why?