She turned left and right, following the corridor between stacks and never once finding a whole book. Her feet kicked through drifts of ash. Some of them came up to her knees, and she wondered at the countless forgotten things around her. She could never know them, because ash cannot be read.
She realized that she was crying. A few tears dropped to the floor and darkened, sinking down and forming small pits in the ashen surface. She moved on, wiping her face because she did not wish to leave anything of herself behind.
She reached a reading area, with leather chairs and a low table piled with burnt books. She was not surprised to see a young man sitting in one of the chairs. She thought she recognized him. Someone from Noreela City, perhaps? A visitor to her library, someone she had regularly passed in the street? He smiled at her. Everything about him was familiar, yet just out of reach.
“We thought it would be easier for you if we presented ourselves like this,” the man said, and she almost knew his voice. “Please, take a seat.”
Alishia sat down, perfectly at ease. The man was quite young-perhaps the age she had been when this began-and his clothing was unremarkable. There was a constant smile on his face, but she noticed that it seemed not to touch his eyes. They were dark, and deep. She felt as though she could lose herself in there. They reminded her of that place beneath the library floor.
“I’m frightened,” she said, no longer at ease.
“Don’t be. We’re not here to hurt you.”
Alishia looked around, expecting to see more people stepping from the charred shadows.
“We’re all here,” the man said, touching his chest.
“You’re the Shades of the Land,” Alishia said, and the man nodded. “The Birth Shade,” she continued, “and the Death Shade, and the Half-Life Shade.”
Again, the man nodded. “You’re a wise young girl.”
“I’m not as young as I appear.”
“Obviously. Strange. But we accept that, because it is.” He stood and walked around the reading area, kicking casually at a pile of ash. “Human history has turned to smoke,” he said, “and there’s no future to be written. Not here. Not as things stand.”
“I’m here to change that,” Alishia said. “The Mages can’t win. There was a boy, and they took him, and now there’s me, and I have something of what he had…but not the exact same thing. I think I have a seed for something new. Something fresh.”
The man still walked, looking down at his feet. Dust rose around him as he kicked through the ash. If he kept kicking perhaps he would obscure himself completely.
“We guard the Womb,” he said. “We tend it. We are the soul of the land.”
“You have to let me in.”
“Haveto?” The man looked up. That smile, so beatific yet still not touching his eyes.
Alishia fought hard not to avert her gaze. “I’m important,” she said.
The man nodded. “Your sort are always so filled with self-importance. Always sosure that you’re the only things of worth. Noreela is so much more than the humans who live upon it, you know.”
“Like the tumblers? Nax? Evil things.”
“Differentthings.” The man sat down before Alishia once more. “There are spirits of the air; a whole world folded beneath the surface of Sordon Sound; a great, mad mind south of Kang Kang; people living much deeper than any fledge mine, so deep that they have no concept of the surface. There’sso much I could show you and tell you, if only you could take it all in.”
“I can!”
He shook his head. “You’re still too human.”
“But it’s the whole of Noreela under threat from the Mages! You’ve guided and protected me this far…haven’t you?”
The man inclined his head but did not reply.
“Why bring me this far and then-”
“Surely the witch brought you?”
“She brought me, and sometimes I brought her. But I think she’s taken with her lust for magic.”
The man touched his chin and stroked it, as though unused to having skin. “You’ve been through this place,” he said, indicating the silent, dead library around them. “You’ve read the language of the land, and you read it well. You’re intelligent. You know what we need.”
“Sacrifice.”
The man laughed out loud, shaking his head. His eyes were still dark. “Offerings, Alishia. Or keys. You have been helped, now help us. Not a sacrifice. We’re Shades, not gods. You see so much black and white, with no shades in between. There is no true darkness or light.”
“The Mages. There’s nothing other than evil in them.”
“They’re human. They were normal people, once. One was a Shantasi Mystic; the other became his lover.”
“Why are you doing this?” Alishia asked. She felt tears threatening, and she bit her lip to hold them back. She had no wish to show weakness before this…soul. I’m talking to the land itself, and I’m speaking its language, and I’m too proud to cry for Noreela.
“Because things are so different. The Womb has birthed many times before, but it has never been seeded from outside. We have never let anythingin. Yet events roll, and new things happen, and new magic will arise from this. Anevolved magic. And we are responsible. We’re the soul of the land, after all.”
“But why the offerings? Why can’t you just help me?” The first tear slipped from Alishia’s left eye.
The man watched the tear trace a path through the grime on Alishia’s cheek. She felt his gaze upon her, touching her skin, and the pressure of his presence was too great to bear. She started to shake, and he backed away, merging into the shadows between two blackened book stacks. He became little more than a shadow himself.
“Because of that tear,” he said. “Because humans suffer. And in suffering, you may at last find your soul.”
And then he was gone, and Alishia was left alone in her void of burnt memories.
HOPE SAT BENEATH the false daylight and held the dead girl on her lap. The valley containing the Womb of the Land was silent compared to the rest of Kang Kang. Gone were the grinding of rocks, the hushing of shadows rubbing together, the breath of the wind and the calls or cries of things killing or being killed. An occasional breeze stirred the long grass and sent waves across the slopes, but it was virtually silent. Even the shifting grass chose not to whisper. The only definable sound in this strange valley was the sobbing of an old woman.
If she truly had seen the Mages passing them by back there in Kang Kang, then they had not yet found this place. She didn’t know whether that was even important anymore.
She had been to see the entrance to the Womb of the Land. It was unremarkable; a cave, a small stream running from it. She had carried Alishia in her arms, and even thirty steps away she knew that she would not be able to enter. The shadows in there were too solid. She threw a stone and it disappeared inside, but she heard no echoes. She dipped her toes in the stream. But she would not drink of that water.
So she had moved away again, sat back down, and now she waited for what would happen next.
Alishia moved. Hope held her breath, grasped the girl tighter and looked down. The girl’s face was still slack and pale, mouth hanging slightly open, but one of her eyelids had raised to reveal the dark half-moon of her pupil. Her eye turned, centered on Hope. Her lips twitched. Another adult tooth fell from her mouth, and a single tear left her eye. It ran a clear path down the girl’s dirty cheek.
“You’re alive!” the witch said. She hugged the girl to her, breathing in Alishia’s breath and looking around to see if the world looked any different. But we’re here! she thought. We’re at the Womb of the Land. Surely everything will change now? Surely the magic will come back and everything will be better? But the very idea of that felt impossible. How could anything really be better, ever again? The witch felt the power of the girl in her arms, radiating out in waves now that she had returned, but Hope herself was still a false witch without charms or tricks. She was the last of her line, destined to die cold and alone. Even if Alishia fulfilled whatever vague destiny she had discovered, Hope would be no part of it.
She remembered rising from the pit of the dead Sleeping God and lashing out at Trey. A moment of violence, a flash of red in her mind, and since then she had cast it deep, not wishing to dwell on the fate of the fledge miner. Out of every bad thing she had done in her life, that act had damned her forever.