“Come on,” Alishia said. “We can’t stay here. We have to move closer to the Womb, and when the chance comes I can go inside.”
“But the offerings,” Hope said.
“Maybe I can slip by without them knowing.” But Alishia knew how foolish this idea was. The two remaining Shades might be fighting the Mages, but their prime purpose was defending the Womb of the Land. It was Noreela’s potential, as were they. I’m the offering for the Birth Shade, she thought. I can think of nothing else. Yet the Half-Life Shade? Hope? How can she be that? She’s an old witch without magic, but she’s very much alive.
Alishia darted from cover and moved low across the hillside. She sensed Hope following her, and for once she took heart from that. Perhaps the witch really did have goodness at the heart of her, hidden away by decades of bitterness.
The two Shades danced in the air above the Mages, hiding the sorcerers from view much of the time. Their darkness pulsed and changed, spurts of shadow spinning out and turning like a whirlpool, sucking in the light and expanding some more. Fingers of darkness probed the air. Others dipped down to the ground far from the fight, searching cracks and dips, stealing behind rocks, and Alishia was certain that the Shades were seeking her out.
She ducked behind a fallen tree and held her breath, closed her eyes, expecting the human manifestation of the Shades to speak to her again. He remained silent.
Hope dropped down beside her. “I can’t see them anymore!” she said. “Maybe they’re defeated. Maybe the Shades have crushed them down!”
“I can’t believe it would ever be that easy,” Alishia said. Another jarring explosion agreed with her, thudding up into her hip and shoulder and shaking her insides.
“Mage shit!” More blood spurted from Hope’s nose. Her left eye had become totally bloodshot, turning this way and that as though fascinated with this new take on the world.
“Come on,” Alishia said, readying to stand again. The witch grabbed her arm and held on tightly.
“Don’t run blind, Alishia,” she said. “You don’t know what’s happening, or what to do when you get there. Wait.”
“For what?”
Hope shook her head, exasperated. “Don’t you think the land will provide? Those Nax arrived with Trey, and that was far from coincidence.”
“No one pretends to know the Nax,” the girl said. Her own voice fascinated her-so young, so full of wisdom.
“And yet they intervene,” Hope said.
“And you?” Alishia said. “When you cut Trey down, did you think you were serving the land?”
Hope shook her head. “Only my own madness.”
Something screamed. The sound began deep, rising so high that Alishia thought her skull would break. The fallen tree they were resting against shook and split along its length, spitting a shower of dead beetles and wood slugs down onto Alishia’s head and shoulders. She bit her lip to prevent herself from crying out. The beetles were light as a breath, their clear wings spread from their resting position on their backs as though they had tried to fly from death.
“The fight’s moving,” Hope said, looking over the top of the cracked trunk.
Alishia shook her head and brushed at her shoulders as she knelt beside the witch. The dead creatures fell apart at her touch. Like old, dry books caught in a fire.
The Mages had retreated back to their machine, and were now standing on its back fending off the two Shades of the Land. The Shades attacked from either side, flashes of darkness darting out like negative lightning. The Mages held handfuls of blue light, and every time the Shades came at them they used the sickly illumination to cauterize the darkness into a light ash. The air around them was thick with it, and it had begun to coat the machine around their feet like a layer of fresh snow.
The Shades moved like mountains, and the Mages fought back.
One of the Shades changed tactics. Instead of attacking the Mages, it assaulted their machine, melting across the ground and sending tendrils of shadow beneath the construct, then expanding again, lifting the machine up. It pumped more of itself under the machine, shrugging off the thing’s defenses: fireballs faded, arrows passed through and molten metal spattered on the hillside and steamed back to solid.
The Mages almost lost their footing. The female jumped and landed again, screaming a curse as she unleashed a stream of blue fire directly between her feet into the machine.
It exploded. Whether or not the Mage had intended this, the effect was devastating. The machine’s shell came apart under a ball of fire, chunks of metal and stone, flesh and bone spinning up and out into the air, streaming blue flame and smoke behind them. The two Mages went with it, visible for the first couple of seconds but then engulfed as their clothes and hair ignited. The ground beneath the machine erupted as though pushed from below, and soil and rock were powered out sideways.
Alishia and Hope ducked as the first of the debris struck the other side of the fallen tree, sending timber splinters carving over their heads. A wave of heat stole their breath, and the fringes on Alishia’s dress began to smoke. Hope patted at them, hissing as the skin of her palms blistered.
The roar of the explosion rumbled back and forth across the valley.
Alishia looked again. Hope grabbed at her but she shook the witch off. “I have to see where they went!” she said.
The entire slope below the Womb of the Land was ablaze. Green grass was black, lush trees were bare trunks, their leaves fluttering through the air, smoking and bursting alight when the heat finally dried them to nothing. The small stream had vanished, steamed away to nothing.
A ball of smoke and fire boiled into the sky. The construct was in pieces across the valley. Some of them burned, others seemed to be melting into the ground, disintegrating into their constituent parts of flesh, stone, metal and other material. Alishia scanned the ground around the site of the blast, hoping against hope that she would see the Mages burned to a crisp: charred bones cracked and coming apart just as their monstrous machine broke down into nothing.
The Shades had vanished. The Womb of the Land was as dark as ever, shunning the blazing fires that should be lighting its insides. I’ll be there soon, Alishia thought, and she hoped that they heard.
Something shifted before her, less than thirty steps away. At first she thought it was part of the machine, warping and cracking under the tremendous heat, but then it stood.
And laughed.
The laughter extinguished the flames licking at the Mage’s eyes. Its tongue flipped out and lapped up the remaining fingers of fire. It ran its hands down the length of its burnt and disfigured body, and wherever they touched flesh was renewed. The Mage rebuilt itself touch by touch, and by the time it reached its eyes, Alishia was already turning away.
“There you are,” the Mage said, its feminine voice as out of place as a shadow inside fire. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. You-and this place-have taken alot of finding.”
Something struck Alishia from behind. She fell and rose again, and heard a scream as the ground rolled away beneath her.
HOPE REMAINED HUNKERED down beside the fallen tree. Dead beetles dusted her legs. The dried husks of wood slugs fluttered around her feet in the wafting heat from the blaze.
She hugged herself, trying to crush away her fear.
The Mage screamed again, a venting of rage and frustration that set Hope’s tattoos squirming and lifted every remaining hair on her head into a filthy halo. She wanted to scream herself, but that would give her away. And then she’ll be here, Hope thought, the Mage, that madwoman, and she’ll have me for her vengeance. So she bit into the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger, tasting blood and concentrating on the pain rather than the scream.