“Mystic Pentle, I can’t leave the city,” she said. “It’s my home. My children’s home. Always here, always been here, and now this, this darkness that brings such madness…” She was barely coherent. Her eyes were jumping in their sockets, as though not wishing to focus on anything.
“What happened to you?” O’Gan asked.
“My husband wanted to leave. Said it wasn’t safe here. Took the children. I went after him but they’re lost to me now…I fell, and the crowds walked on me.”
“No one helped you up?”
The woman nodded. “An Elder Mystic. Then she left me bleeding and crying.” She suddenly seemed to find focus, eyes locking on O’Gan’s, pleading and desperate. “What’s happening? Where is everyone going?”
“They want safety, that’s all,” O’Gan said. “Your husband did what he thought was best. Your children…” But O’Gan could not finish. Mystics did not have children, and he could never hope to understand.
The woman looked up at him, tears slipping down her cheeks and reflecting flickering light from a nearby lantern. “I know he’s right,” she said. “That’s the worst. I know he’s right, and still I can’t leave.” She held her face in her hands and started crying, real tears that rose from deep within and shuddered her shoulders.
“There’s still hope,” O’Gan said, touching her face. The tears were hot, and neither his words nor touch seemed to help.
He moved past the woman and approached the door to the Temple’s huge inner hall. It was ajar. A sliver of darkness peered out-no light, no evidence of candles or lanterns burning within. He tried to drive away the bitter disappointment. Coming down, he had started to believe there would be Mystics gathered here, ready to plan the defense of Hess. Now it seemed that he had been wrong, and that the Elder Mystic had been right. Fleeing the city was the only plan they had.
He shoved the heavy wooden door with his foot. The hinges squealed, weak light filtered in and what O’Gan saw shocked him to the core. It was Elder Garia, a woman five decades older than O’Gan with whom he had often spent time on the Temple. She had enjoyed his company, and she had been close with several other Mystics, her natural disposition one of companionship and friendship.
But Elder Garia had spent her last moments on Noreela alone.
She was splayed on the tiled floor just inside the door, as if at the last moment she had changed her mind and sought help. In her right hand was the knife that had opened her wrists; in her left, a clutch of Janne blossom, stolen from the roof, rotten and rank and bleeding black sap between stiff fingers.
“Oh no,” O’Gan said. He closed his eyes, but that did little to hide the image. He thought of the other corpse he had just seen-the image of A’Meer-and the word she had given him in her silent plea: Hope. However that vision had been brought to him, whatever that shadow had been, he had to believe it was true. If not, then Mystic Garia’s fate was perhaps the wisest choice she had ever made.
O’Gan fled the Temple. The crying woman had crumpled to the ground, and he knew that he should help her, offer guidance through her confusion. But if he helped her, there would be another, and another, and eventually he would be drawn into hopelessness. He could help one, or he could help one million.
He closed his eyes and moved on. He often walked this way through the streets, continuing his inner dialogue as he moved, but now his dialogue was confused and the streets were unforgiving. He bumped into a man after a dozen steps. “You’re going north, Mystic,” the man said.
“And which way should I be going?”
“South, away from those damn Mages and whatever they’ve brought to Noreela!”
“I don’t think they brought anything,” O’Gan said. “I think they came and found it here.”
“Either way, magic’s theirs now,” the man said.
“Who told you that?”
“It’s the word everywhere!” The man lowered his eyes, uncomfortable at talking this way to a Mystic.
“There’s hope,” O’Gan said. “That’s another word-my word-and I want you to spread it. Will you do that for me?”
The man glanced up, frowning, looking over O’Gan’s shoulder at the tall, empty Temple. “Hope when all the Mystics flee with us?”
“Not all,” O’Gan said. He thought of Elder Garia dead by her own hand.
“Some are dead,” the man whispered, awed. “My brother saw them down by the coast, kneeling in the sand and drawing their swords and-”
“Mystics?”
“A dozen of them!”
“Your brother lied to you.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, but even in such a time he could not express anger at a Mystic.
I hope, O’Gan thought. I hope he lied. I’d have known if so many had died; I’d have felt it. Our collective mind would have screamed and railed against it…
And his mind when he breathed in the Janne pollen was a blank, devoid of life.
“He lied,” O’Gan said again, more to himself than the man.
“Forgive me,” the man said. He moved past O’Gan and hurried away.
There must be some of us left, O’Gan thought. An Elder Mystic, someone I can tell about the appearance of A’Meer. Someone who’ll know what that means, and what to do. Where to go.
A group of Shantasi warriors trotted past him heading north, going against the flow. Their long dark hair was tied, pale skin made paler by the poor light, and their extensive weaponry was worn so precisely that it made no sound.
“Good,” O’Gan said, and the last warrior in line turned to look at him. O’Gan saw terror in the woman’s eyes.
He walked on through the streets, looking for someone who could tell him what he had seen.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 5
FLAGE WAS BORN over fifty years earlier, when he was twenty years old. When he died.
Only a privileged few can remember the moment of their birth. But perhaps such crushing exposure and agonizing animation is best left forgotten.
He retained a vivid memory of that birth and the moments that led to it. He was a rover, prowling the northern extremes of Kang Kang with his small rover band, always traveling east to west to make sure they kept Kang Kang to their left. Left was the evil side, right the good. If they turned around and headed east, Kang Kang would be to their right, and its neutral influence on their roving group would change without warning. Right would become wrong, and Flage had seen the results of rovers traveling in the opposite direction-the shattered wagons and the torn bodies, the strange sigils carved into murdered men’s chests and the insides of dead women’s thighs-and he had no wish to meet whatever had done that. Some said that Kang Kang was a mother with countless children, and each and every one of them served her without thought or question. They lived in the valleys of her flesh and the folds of her guts, and when called upon they emerged into the sunlight and made it their own. No one had ever seen these children of Kang Kang, so their appearance was conjecture and myth: the height of ten men, the girth of a horse, hands of stone and heads of bone, eyes lit by timeless fires from the roots of the mountains where dark things gathered around the meager light there was.
Every year, Flage heard fresh whispers of these demons, and each time their appearance was more terrifying than ever.
They had been roving and camping across the plains north of Kang Kang for a couple of years, gathering furbats from caves and canyons and milking them of their rhellim. Once every life moon, a group of rovers would travel north or west with the rhellim, trading with small farming communities or the larger villages around The Heights. They would return with food, drink and tellan coins, and news of the outside world that barely interested the rovers. Their lives were their own, and though they shared the landscape with others, that did not mean that there was any need to interact with greater Noreela. The land was dying, but they barely looked further than the next day.