“I can’t look,” Hope whispered beside her. “I can’tsee. ”
“What do you think we’re seeing?” Alishia asked, though she already knew. She knew because Trey was there, suspended between these things like a baby borne by multiple mothers. He was naked, his skin smooth and soft and yellow.
“I don’t know,” Hope said, “but they must be gods.”
Alishia looked at the things carrying Trey, but she could not make them out properly. She was not even sure how many there were. They seemed to shy away from the light, like a shadow fading the instant a lamp was lit. There but not there, a trick of the light and a truth of the dark. What shecould see was terrible, but perhaps only because she expected it to be so: ragged wings, long limbs with reflections of hooks, blades and nails, and faces that seemed to exude pure sunlight.
“Oh no,” Alishia said.
“What?” Hope was hiding her eyes, and she glanced up at Alishia kneeling beside her.
Alishia ignored the witch. Here he comes, she thought. The man I saved, and look at him now. Look at him. An offering if ever I saw one. He appeared to be dead, carried by the Nax from wherever Hope had murdered him, because surely they knew what this was all about. The Nax were gods, weren’t they? Gods and demons both, more powerful than thought and more dreadful than the worst of nightmares.
Trey had feared them, and now he was with them.
They came closer, and as they brought Trey nearer, Alishia could see the gaping wounds across his arm and chest. The cuts pouted pale and fleshy, bloodless, flesh yellowed by fledge.
“Trey?” Alishia called, her voice incredibly loud in this place that held its breath. He gave no reaction. He floated down to them, carried by the shadows of the Nax.
“Don’t look!” Hope screeched, and something laughed.
They reached the rock overhang above the Womb of the Land and made their way around it, bringing the naked, motionless fledge miner down the slope to where Alishia and Hope waited.
Alishia was suddenly cold and terrified, certain that this was happening and mortified by that certainty. She felt something probing at her mind and pushed it away; its tendrils were cool and utterly inhuman, and she had no wish to bear something like that.
Hope groaned beside her, pushing her face into the ground.
“Trey?” Alishia said again. She stood and stepped forward, trying her best to ignore the things that carried him. She knew that if she really scrutinized them they would manifest before her and allow her examination, but she did not know why. Because I’m human? Because I’m me? They had brought Trey here, and they must have their reasons. She only hoped that their reasons were in harmony with her own.
Trey opened his eyes. They were pure yellow, with no pupils or whites remaining. Alishia could not believe that they could see, but he turned to her and smiled, the creases at the corners of his eyes caked with fledge. He opened his mouth to speak but exhaled only a whisper of the drug.
Alishia felt something else prodding at her mind and she smiled, closed her eyes and let him in.
Trey!
Alishia…the witch, Hope, is that her down there?
It’s her.
She attacked me. She’s dangerous, and mad!
I know, Trey. She tried to calm him, mentally stroking his brow. She’s mad, but she always wanted what we need.
What’s happening?
I’m waiting to go in, but I don’t know when. But if we have time, I think everything will be all right. That’s what it’s down to now: time.
Time, Trey said, and his voice drifted away.
He withdrew from her mind and smiled again, reaching out for Alishia’s hand. She squeezed, and he was cool.
The things lowered him to the ground and moved away, fluttering across the grass, climbing the slopes and merging back into the dusk beyond the valley. Against her better judgment Alishia watched them, and it was only as they passed from light to dusk that she perceived their true form.
She shivered, and Trey squeezed her hand again.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he said, voice hoarse and dry. His teeth were yellow, his tongue sat in his mouth like a fist of fledge and his eyes closed as he rested back on the ground.
Alishia knelt by his side and touched his face, turning him to her. “Trey.”
He opened his eyes again and looked at her. “Another hillside, and this time I’ve found you. You really are just a little girl.”
“I am,” she said, her voice tinged with an age of unrealized wisdom. “Trey, can you cast? Can you travel? Can you tell me what’s happening in Noreela?”
He sighed. “Now that they’ve gone, I think I can do anything. I’m more fledge now than man.” His head tilted back, and Alishia let him rest.
She put her hand on his chest and looked down his naked body. So strong, she thought. Perhaps I would have known him. And then his heart started beating faster than should have been possible, and his eyelids were rolling as he went away.
HOPE TRIED TO approach Trey, but Alishia kept her away with a simple look. You’ve harmed him once, that look said, how dare you come to him again?
The witch walked toward the entrance to the Womb of the Land, squatting and staring into the impenetrable darkness. Her thinning hair drifted around her brows now and then, as though stirred by a breath from the cave.
It was only a few minutes later that Trey woke, sitting up and crying out, his good hand reaching out to the darkness as if to ward it off. “They’re coming!” he shouted.
“Trey!” Alishia tried to calm him, but wherever she touched he flinched away, never meeting her eyes, staring into a distance she had no wish to see.
“They’re on their way!” he said again. “They know, they’re searching for this place, circling Kang Kang andsearching. ”
“The Mages?”
“Yes, them. ” He looked at Alishia then, his yellow eyes filled with tears. “Not long, Alishia,” he said.
She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him to the ground, and she felt his heart slowing as she sat beside him. “There’s water here, and food,” she said, touching his lips.
“I need neither.” His breath smelled of caves and fledge.
“What else did you see?”
“So much. But all fragmentary. I traveled, and I saw so much. All of it bad, Alishia. Noreela awash with blood. People dead, and living, and many in between. A war. Men and women fighting machines and dying, and…other things fighting as well. For the machines or against them, I couldn’t tell. Some things I can’t see.” He frowned and closed his eyes, trying to remember or forget. “But I sawthem. I don’t know how near or far, but they’re above Kang Kang and coming this way. Every heartbeat brings them closer, and theyknew I was seeing them. Theyknew !”
“By hawk?”
“A flying thing. Like a hawk but so much bigger.” Trey’s heart was slowing even more, and Alishia moved her hand on his chest, trying to rediscover its beat.
“I can’t get into the Womb, not yet. There are Shades guarding it.”
“The Shades of the Land?”
“How do you know?”
“You have such an innocent mind. Like Rafe. I slipped in, just for a moment, and saw.”
“Then you know what the Shades ask for. They want us to suffer. They say that way, we’ll find our soul.”
“I’m an offering,” he said.
“It’s the Half-Life Shade that wants you, Trey. You’re all fledge now, and…” His heartbeat had reduced to a few per minute, weak flutterings as though a bird were trapped in his chest.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that one. Another. Take me down.”
Alishia dragged him down the hillside. He moved through the grass easily, as though fledge smoothed the way. Every time he exhaled, a haze of the drug blurred his features. Another, he had said. The Birth Shade? Was he changing into something else? Was it too much to believe that Trey was becoming much more of the fledge than any fledge miner had ever imagined?
Alishia stared hard at him, but he was still all there.
He could never be a Nax, she thought.