The battle in the graveyard was a day behind him, and with every breath since then he had known that the Mages had won. Magic was back, they had taken it for themselves, and yet blood pumped through his veins, clotting around his wounds, drawing rent flesh back together, stiffening fractured bones, feeding on the rage that was stronger than ever before. In the constant, unnatural twilight that had marked the Mages’ return he felt a sense of cool defeat, but deep down Lucien still had a burning purpose driving him on. He had seen the dead Shantasi melt and flow across the ground, and the implication of what that could mean drove him on. His whole life had been directed toward one purpose. The fact that he still lived, weakened though he was, gave him a sense that could have been hope.
He moved on toward the village. It was a motley collection of huts and shacks-triangular constructions built low to the ground to weather the storms blowing in from the Mol’Steria Desert. No dwelling rose higher than his head, and it was only the contours of the land that prevented him from seeing right across the village. That, and the dusky light. It should be dawn-all of his senses suggested that-and yet dusk still clung to the sky. There were no smudges of the sun hidden behind the clouds, and the death moon sheened the land with a sickly illumination. In this light, Lucien’s blood was black.
The Mages’ first effect on Noreela, with the magic he had sworn they would never again possess.
From the village came the scrape of metal on stone. Lucien paused. He could see no movement, but the sound was shifting slowly from right to left. He tried to silence his breathing but could not; his injuries were too varied, their effects too harsh.
He could smell death here, but he could sense fear as well. It was manifest in the silence, the stillness, the way that no door opened even a crack as he approached the village from the west. In the light of the death moon the villagers would see him walking along the rutted road. They would see his sword, his torn cloak and the wounds that still seeped blood. Some of them might even know of the Red Monks, and the cause that drove their madness. Yet today…
“Failure tastes bitter,” Lucien muttered. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the road and ground it down into the dust. The scrape of his boot was loud in the eerie silence hugging this village.
Not even the sound of an animal, a bird, a plant shifting in the breeze coming in across the desert.
“I don’t fear you!” Lucien shouted, blood bubbling heavy and thick in his chest. He spat again, up at the sky this time, and welcomed the blood pattering down on his face. It gave him back his color.
The sound of metal on stone came again, from two directions this time, and below it he could hear something dragging across the ground, like an echo of his foot grinding blood into the dust.
“We can lose, but you can never win,” he whispered. And he still believed that. Through everything that had happened over the past few days, he still believed in his cause. He had to. If he lost faith now, his body would give in. His faith gave him power.
The first shape emerged from behind one of the low houses, crawling slowly into view. He could not tell whether it was a man or woman. In one hand it seemed to be holding a sword, and its legs were clad in metal. Each time it moved, it moaned.
Another shape crawled toward him out of the darkness. This one held two swords and wore a metallic mask, shiny in places and smeared with blood in others.
The Red Monk stood his ground and hefted his own weapon, but he sensed no fight in these things. They were not coming for him. They were simply moving, because to stay still was to submit to the pain of transformation. As the first shape came closer, Lucien saw that they were not holding swords at all.
Their hands had turned to metal. Legs too, and faces, flesh blurring to silver. And this close he could hear their moans more clearly, tell that somewhere behind that human sound of pain was an inhuman clicking and rattling as things inside milled together.
Lucien could see human eyes moving behind the metal facade of the second shape’s face. They held nothing sane.
He stepped back, avoiding these crawling monsters. They must have started changing before the Mages’ victory, yet still he blamed the magic. It was the cause of everything wrong in the land, and these travesties were more examples of a bad world growing worse.
Lucien dodged past the half-human things and ran through the village. Here and there he saw a glimmer of metal beside the low dwellings, but he did not pause. As he passed the outskirts he saw the remains of a huge old machine half buried in the ground, and the death moon reflected from fresh breaks in the various metallic limbs. Perhaps it had spread like a disease.
He ran, ignoring the screams of his wounds, and for a long time after he checked himself all over, searching for the first spikes of metal forming from within.
THREE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Jossua Elmantoz had helped force the Mages from Noreela and felt magic forsaking the land. Now, crossing the mountain range southeast of Lake Denyah, he knew that they were back. Magic had returned, changing the world into a constant state of twilight. The only explanation for this that made sense was that the Mages once again had magic for themselves. They had found the boy Rafe Baburn and extracted the seed of magic he carried; forced it to bloom to their own calling, twisted it once again to their own desires. The very thing he had spent his long life trying to prevent had happened. He had failed. The Red Monks were lost. They would die and fade into obscurity, reviled and cast as demons, when in reality it was this that they had been striving to prevent all along.
The end of Noreela.
Jossua walked on because there was nothing else for him to do. He still held on to hope, because without hope there was only death. But everything felt empty and pointless, each movement without meaning and every thought existing only to drift away and be lost to history. Nobody would know if he lay down and died in these mountains. He would become food for scavengers. Or perhaps the carrion creatures would eschew his old, rotten meat-too tough for them, too strange-and leave him to rot into whatever the land was becoming.
Noreela would change. The Mages were not here for control or power. This time, they came for revenge.
But his rage roared on. His anger at the Mages, his fury at his own Monks’ inability to halt magic’s path across the land-a boy, it had only beenone boy!-drove him onward. That, and the faintest idea that hope could never be fully extinguished.
Something slinked out of the night and came toward him, a wild animal stinking of old dead flesh and growling deep within its throat. Jossua paused and scanned the shadows; his eyes were bad, and dusk stole what vision he still retained. He saw a shadow within shadows, and when it moved it was huge.
The creature growled, and Jossua growled back.
Footsteps scampered away into the night. Jossua growled again, to himself this time, and he relished the sense of fury filling him, flushing his face with blood, singing into his sheathed sword and demanding that something wet its pitted metal.
He continued on toward Kang Kang. His aims were changed now, but his final destination must surely be the same. There was only one place left on Noreela where perhaps he could find answers, and where hope may yet dwelclass="underline" the Womb of the Land.
And he had a map.
KOSAR HAD NEVER felt so wretched. His thoughts lay with A’Meer, and Rafe, and how he had let them both down. He should have remained in those woods with A’Meer, and perhaps together they could have fought their way to the machines’ graveyard, covering each other’s retreat. And Rafe…if Kosar had jumped at his legs and held tighter, or launched himself at the Mage, or fought with no regard for his own life, maybe then the boy could have been saved…
He knew that neither of these scenarios would have been possible, yet he played them out perpetually in his mind. He and A’Meer fighting their way through the woods, ducking sword blows from dozens of Monks, jumping from tree to tree and scoring hits without being wounded themselves. A’Meer’s face, grim yet determined. Blood splashed on her pale skin. Her dark hair loose from where a Monk’s sword had sliced through the band.