Alishia lay on her side, pressed into the shelf of rock and covered with a blanket Hope still carried. The girl was very quiet. Her scalp was bleeding. She had fallen soon after leaving the machine and struck her head on a rock.
Hope sat close, brushing hair away from the wound.
Kosar told Trey and Hope of his experience with the mimics. Hope’s eyes were wide, her tattoos reflecting her interest.
“And there was only one image of A’Meer?” she said.
“Yes, only one.”
“And she was cut up, dead?”
“Yes.” Kosar stared into the fire, seeing a hundred strange dancing shapes within its flames. When he was a boy he had dreamed of living inside a fire, exploring the molten caves of wood and coal, but he had never considered what the heat would do to him. He sometimes wished he still possessed that childlike naivete.
“They went east?”
Kosar nodded. “It was like having the land pulled from under me.”
“I think today we can all feel like that,” Hope whispered. She looked down at Alishia and brushed the unconscious girl’s hair again, letting her finger trail through the drying blood. She raised her hand and tapped her finger against her lips, staring into the fire.
What is she doing? Kosar thought. The witch licked her lips and glanced up at Kosar, and for a second her mistrust was obvious.
“We need honesty now,” Kosar said. “More than anything we need to tell one another everything. Don’t you agree, Hope? If there is something that Alishia has, something she can do-”
“Didn’t you run away?” Hope said.
“I saw no reason to stay.”
“And now you do?” She touched Alishia again, lifted a strand of her hair. “Now you want to help this girl, instead of leave her-and us-to whatever fate may befall us?”
Kosar nodded. “The mimics came to me for a reason. That’s why I came back, Hope. And I came back to hear what you know of the mimics. You’re a witch. You pride yourself on such knowledge. I need to know why they showed me what they did, and what message they were trying to convey.”
Hope gave a smile that lit her face. “I think the message is obvious. You’re to go to New Shanti to tell the Shantasi about Alishia. Trey and I are to take her south, to Kang Kang.”
“And what’s in Kang Kang?”
“You think I know?”
“I’m sure you do.”
Hope looked down at the fire again, and Kosar wondered just what she saw in there. I see the echoes of childhood adventure, scorched away by the heat of the real world. What does an old witch see in a campfire?
“I can tell you only what I believe,” she said. “What I know for sure is so much less.”
“I’m sure your beliefs are educated,” Trey said.
“They are at that, fledger.”
“So,” Kosar said. “The mimics. Kang Kang. New Shanti.”
“All linked, and all coming together very quickly,” Hope said. She shifted and sat up, hugging her knees. She glanced down at Alishia, then back up at Trey and Kosar. Even now there was a scheming look in her eye, and Kosar looked away, unnerved.
“How so?” Trey said.
“The mimics-from what I know of them-can be everywhere,” she said. “They pop up here and there, but do they really move? I don’t know; nobody does. They’re as difficult to communicate with as the moons, or the Sleeping Gods. They’re part of Noreela, but no part that we’re used to. The mere fact that they’re intruding into our world, and our problems, makes it obvious that their presence is significant. That was no chance meeting, Kosar. They knew who you were, and they knew who A’Meer was to you. It was a very definite message they wished to convey.”
“For me to go to New Shanti,” Kosar said. He thought of the mimics melting down and flowing east, and there was no other meaning he could read into that.
“Why would they be interested?” Trey said. “If they’re so remote from us, why would they be bothered with Kosar running, A’Meer dying?”
“Noreela is their world as well as ours,” Hope said. “We’ve named it and farmed it and all but destroyed it, but they live here too. I suppose they know how the new magic has already been distorted by the Mages, and they can foresee the effect this will have on them as well as us.”
“They showed us the Monks,” Kosar said.
“They wanted Rafe to survive.”
“They wanted his magic?”
Hope shrugged.
“How can you read their message?” Trey said.
“It seems so obvious to me.”
“But you’re saying that they know about Alishia?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ifthey know about her, what about the Mages?”
Hope stared at Trey, then at Kosar, and in the shifting firelight her tattoos seemed to be twisting across her face like a hundred baby snakes. “Maybe they know also,” she said.
For a second the fire seemed to burn brighter, but Kosar put it down to a gust of wind from the north. Buried embers glowed hotter, flames wavered higher and a chill fingered his spine. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“What makes you so sure?” Hope said.
“Whatever may be happening to Alishia started before the Mages took Rafe. If they’d known then, they would have made sure she died too.”
“They didn’t have magic then,” Hope said. “They were still looking for it.”
“Well, they have it now,” Trey said. “Kosar’s right. If they knew about it, we wouldn’t be sitting here in the cold talking about this.”
Hope looked up as though expecting to be plucked from the ground that very moment. Kosar saw her tattoos picking up reflections from the life and death moons, and neither seemed to suit. She’s a strange woman, he thought, and as if in response she stroked Alishia’s wound again.
“Do you think her blood has power?” Trey said.
“What?”
“Alishia. Her cut head. You keep touching it, and I’m wondering if it’s because you think her blood has power.”
“Of course not, miner.”
“Then leave her alone!” Trey moved to the prone girl’s side and stroked an errant strand of hair from her face.
“Neither of you owns that girl,” Kosar said. Hope glared at him, and Trey glanced up with his doleful yellow eyes. Kosar smiled at Hope. “So, what’s in Kang Kang?”
The old witch sighed and prodded at the fire with a stick. Kosar saw his caves collapse and new ones form, and the future was a whole different story.
“There’s a place there,” she said, pausing as if unwilling to divulge any more. But the two men were silent, giving her time, and eventually Hope carried on. “It’s called the Womb of the Land. I heard about it from my mother and grandmother, but no one I’ve met since has mentioned it. Long ago, I began to think that maybe I dreamed them telling me of it, but the telling was so significant to what has just happened that it must be true.”
“Significant how?”
“It was a prophecy,” she said. “An old one, rarely spoken, and written in languages not used for generations. It said that the future of magic would emerge in a child unborn, one that came from the Womb of the Land in Kang Kang.”
“Birthed from the land?” Kosar asked.
“I assume that’s what it meant. I don’t know what this place looks like: a cave, a field, a lake. Rafe was never born, Kosar. He had no navel, and his parents were not his own.”
“And you think he was from Kang Kang?”
“Yes.”
“And now Alishia wants to return there,” Trey said. “To the land’s womb.”
Hope nodded. “And she’s getting younger.”
“Or so she claims,” Kosar said. “She’s been through a lot. The shade in her mind, ripping her up like that. How can we say what that did to her? How can we even begin to understand?”
“We have to take her,” Trey said.