And it moved. Torsos flexed, limbs twitched. He nudged Lucien and moved sideways, finding fresh ground.
The Monk fought hard, and even though Kosar heard him take several wounds, they barely slowed him.
He was almost starting to feel confident about the fight when he heard the first cry rise up: “The Krotes are here, the Krotes-” The voice was silenced. Dashing away from the dead attacking him, looking down the hill, Kosar saw a sight that seemed to still the blood leaking from his wounds.
The hillside was alive with machines, and awash with dying Shantasi.
ALISHIA FOUND HOPE shivering beneath a tree two hundred steps from the Womb of the Land. The old witch was staring at the ground, eyes wide, hands clasped together at her chest, her hair still bearing a few windblown leaves. She glanced up at Alishia’s approach, and then down again.
“Trey’s been taken in,” Alishia said.
Hope held her breath. “Inside there?” She looked along the hillside at the cave.
“He’s part of my misery,” the girl said. “Misery is humanity.”
“Then it’s time to go inside! See what’s to be done. I’ll go with you and-”
“You will never go in there with me,” Alishia said quietly, and even though she spoke with a little girl’s voice, the witch recoiled in fear.
“I brought you all this way,” Hope said.
Alishia shook her head. “I can’t argue with you. I don’t have the energy.”
“But I-”
“What’s that?” Alishia held up her hand and stilled Hope with a glance. She had heard something, a rumble from far away or a whisper from closer by. Perhaps the Nax were still out there, trailing around the lip of the valley.
“I hear nothing,” Hope said.
Alishia let out her held breath and breathed in again, and as she did so the sky shook. A single, thunderous explosion thumped down into the valley, invisible but for the shock wave that preceded it. Grass flattened, trees cracked, soil and stones jumped as if pushed from below, and Alishia felt her eardrums and eyeballs squeezed. She fell onto her side with a groan and tried to bring her hands to her ears, but her arms would not work.
“In the name of the Black, not again,” Hope said. Her voice was pure fear. Alishia followed her gaze up the hillside.
A giant flying machine sat on the valley ridge, its grotesque head and the tips of its wings protruding from the darkness. It edged forward, as though testing the strange light in the valley. When it found that the light did not hurt, it launched, flexing its wings, stepping from the valley edge and gliding down just above the hillside. Upon its back sat two figures, humanoid yet so much larger in Alishia’s eyes.
“It’sthem!” she said.
“They have magic,” Hope whispered, and Alishia was disturbed by the awe in her voice. What would the witch do? she thought. What would she give up for a touch of what they have?
The machine lifted higher above the ground and drifted across the valley, flapping its huge wings once to lift it over the clump of trees beneath which Alishia and Hope sheltered. Alishia closed her eyes as the thing passed them by. Though there was no sun to block out, still its shadow touched them.
“They’ll find us in minutes,” Alishia said. “They’ll take me and kill me.”
“Then bring it up!” Hope said. “Let the magic in you find itself! Give me something to fight them with and I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”
“If I could touch the magic, don’t you think I’d have done so before now?”
“To protect yourself from me?” Hope said, leaning closer.
Alishia shook her head. “You may be mad, but I’m not sure you’ll ever be a danger to your one and only hope.”
Another explosion came, thumping through the valley and shaking leaves from the trees above their heads. Alishia and Hope rolled on the ground, clasping their ears, squeezing their eyes shut, trying their best not to shout in pain. Perhaps that was what the Mages were trying to do: flush them out.
Alishia pressed her face into the ground and groaned.
The flying machine came again, flapping its wings this time and moving much faster across the valley. Its wing tips scored the ground. Daggers of blue light leapt from its sides and rear, piercing the ground and sending up geysers of soil and molten rock. More fear, more pain, to make Alishia and Hope flee their precarious hiding place.
“Don’t move!” Alishia said. Hope lay beside her, hands pressed to her face. Blood seeped between her fingers.
The machine landed close to the Womb of the Land, its settling surprisingly gentle for something so large. Its wings rested down and touched the ground, taking on its contours and imperfections as they molded themselves to rocks, trees and dips. The Mages stood and walked down the wing closest to the Womb. Neither of them took their eyes from the cave. They carried no weapons, but Alishia knew that they needed none. As Hope said, they had magic.
“Now we’ll never get in there!” Hope whispered. Her nose was bleeding, and a dribble of blood leaked from her left eye. Her tattoos had turned red, as if echoed below the skin by burst veins.
“Neither will they,” Alishia said. But the witch is right. With them there, I can never get inside. And something…
“Alishia,” Hope said, and for the first time the librarian heard a gentleness to the witch’s voice. “You’re growing younger.”
“I know,” Alishia said, but even then she knew what the witch meant. She was regressing faster. Drifting back through the years of her youth, breasts shrunken to hints of themselves, stomach bulging with a little girl’s fat, eyes wide, teeth small, and in her mind everything she had learned of the land over the past few days seemed to be growing larger and more intricate with every breath she took. “Hope, I think I’ll have to be there soon.”
Hope crawled closer, and the witch seemed to be growing. “I could go,” Hope said. “I could offer myself to them. Pretend to help. Say I know where you are. Maybe they’ll touch me, give me something of what they have in exchange.”
“You can’t.”
Hope was looking at the ground close to her face, frowning, her eyes flitting left and right as she turned over whatever dark thoughts she had.
“Hope, that’s not the way,” Alishia said.
The witch looked at her. “You’re afraid for me, or of me?”
“Both.”
Hope nodded and looked along the hillside at the resting machine. “Perhaps you’re right to be,” she said.
The Mages were approaching the entrance to the cave now, and they appeared to be holding hands. Where their skin touched, a pale blue light danced, streaking up their arms and tangling with their hair. There was no companionship or affection apparent in their touch; they did not look at each other. And as they came within a few steps of the cave, the light between them started to grow.
“They’re going to seal the cave,” Alishia said. She closed her eyes and thought of Trey being taken inside, and even with everything she had learned she had no idea what was within that place. A simple cave, perhaps. Or something far more.
“Something’s coming out.” Hope touched her hand.
The darkness of the cave mouth was expanding, extruding into the weird light of its valley. Its edges were vague, the shape constantly changing, but it grew as it came, as though all the darkness from beneath the ground were forcing upward. As it projected farther, the shadow split in two.
The Mages took one step back and then lifted their clasped hands in unison, ejecting a splash of blue light that struck the two shapes where they were still joined at the ground.
The land vibrated with the impact. For the briefest instant, the two shadows were lit from the inside, and Alishia did not understand what she saw. How light could reveal deeper darkness, she did not know. For the moment they were lit-surprised by the blast of magical light, perhaps, or simply absorbing it as best they could-the Half-Life Shade and the Birth Shade seemed larger than everything else. They dwarfed the valley, made a mockery of the expanse of Kang Kang, and they drove Alishia’s newfound knowledge of things down to a speck of inexperience. For a moment they were everything, and then the magical light faded and the Shades fell upon the Mages.