“There’s no time for that,” Lucien said.
“You leave me to do what I have to do!” Kosar replied, angry that the Monk had intervened. “We need a Mourner here.”
“And if there’s any victory in the next few hours, we’ll get many. In the meantime, it’s those that are still alive we should be helping, not the lost wraiths of those growing cold.”
“You’re all heart.”
“I’m a Red Monk.”
They moved on together, and mimic soldiershushed past them whenever another machine was spied. They passed one construct sprouting half a body where a Krote was melting away. The machine itself was under attack as well, bindings tearing, the arcane building blocks of its form failing. Limbs fell, stone disintegrated and brief fires erupted at its heart until the mimics starved the flames of air. Not only was this a slaughter, it was a very precise, clean slaughter. For some reason that made Kosar uneasy.
At last they emerged onto grassland not crawling with mimics, and here they found the true battle still under way. Kosar glanced back, wondering at the extent of the mimic help, and it was like looking at reality unbecoming: machines were melting, their Krote riders already coming apart, and blue fire disappeared in a flash. The whole landscape was blurred and uncertain.
“I don’t see how this can go on,” Lucien said.
“What do you mean? Noreela is helping us! The serpenthals, and the tumblers, and now the mimics. What do you mean?”
“Look,” Lucien said. He pointed across the hillside with his bloodied sword.
The ground was covered with the dead and dying. Machines stalked here and there, dishing out more death and, occasionally, finding it themselves. Several machines stood dead in a circle, the result of some unknown attack, but their Krote riders had escaped their fate and were now fighting the Shantasi on foot. The clang of swords, the spark of metal meeting metal, drifted across the hill. And from one extreme of the battlefield to the other, the dead were rising again.
“Mimics,” Kosar said, but he knew immediately that he was wrong. These were the dead readying to bear arms against their Shantasi kin. Among them, oozing like a slippery memory, a stain on the hillside.
“That’s a shade,” Lucien said. “The Mages have given it something, and for every Shantasi killed we have a new enemy.”
“That’s unreal,” Kosar said. “That’sunfair!”
Lucien laughed. It was a strange sound, so unexpected and unusual on this field of death and undeath. The Monk actually bent over and held his stomach, his burnt back exposed to the air and glistening in the moonlight where the cauterized flesh had started breaking down. “We’re all going to die,” he said. “And you…thinkthat’s unfair?”
Kosar was angry at first, but then he smiled.
Neither of them heard the machine rush them from out of a haze of smoke. It stomped Lucien to the ground, pressed down on his throat with one heavy stone leg, and on its back the fearsome Krote stood and smiled. “Glad to see you think war is so amusing,” she said. “You could almost be one of us.” She touched the machine’s back and it balanced all its weight on one leg, crushing Lucien’s chest and neck, parting his head from his body, squeezing out his final breath in a haze of blood and spit.
THAT FELT GOOD, Lenora thought. Red Monk fighting with the Shantasi! she sent to her machine, and it ground its foot some more, turning its stone heel until it met mud wetted with blood.
“You’re no Shantasi,” Lenora said, looking at the man cowering before her. She frowned. Something about his features, his hair, the smell of him…“I know you,” she said.
“Last time I saw you, I made you fall,” the man said. “I’m Kosar. And you’ve just killed another friend of mine.”
“You were friends with a Monk?”
Kosar glanced down at the mess beneath the machine’s legs, up again at Lenora. “He was against you. That makes him my friend.”
Lenora slid from the machine’s back and landed astride the Monk’s remains. She drew a sword and thrust it down into his chest-these Monks were tenacious, and she wanted to take no chances-and then stood and faced the defiant man. She felt those eyes behind her, watching. “Do you recognize my machine? See any familiar features?”
Kosar did not glance away from her face. “It’s a monster,” he said. “As are you.”
Lenora shrugged, and she bled. She had gathered several more wounds to wear alongside those from so long ago, and even her old scars were aching again, singing with the memory of their creation. “You were traveling with monsters,” she said. “That witch, with betrayal in her eyes. That boy, carrying something awful. That girl…” She frowned, but tried not to show her doubt.
“Rafe had magic. It would have beengood for the land.” Kosar spat on his sword. “And why thefuck am I even talking with you?” He darted at her, sword swinging up toward her stomach.
Lenora sidestepped and cracked him on the temple with her sword handle. He groaned and fell, fingers splayed in the bloody muck around the dead Monk.
Kosar stood and turned on her, and in his eyes Lenora saw pride, and determination, and a confidence that belied his situation. She had seen the tumblers and fought one off. She had ridden through the gray haze rising from the ground, and it came apart before her machine. The swirling sand demons were still fighting the Krote’s rear guard back on the plain, and ahead of them lay Kang Kang and the girl with her brains crushed into the dirt. But for a moment, this man unsettled her more than anything she had yet seen of Noreela. For a moment, he made her feel mortal.
“What surprises do you have left?” Lenora said. Come with me, the voice of her daughter whispered, and Lenora closed her eyes for an instant, trying to put the voice back down.
Kosar laughed. He saw that she had a weakness. Lenora tried to grin, but a pang of pain in her womb turned it into a grimace.
“Are you hurting?” he asked.
Lenora had been asked that recently, by Ducianne. And as she went at Kosar she realized that, yes, she was hurting. Soon, perhaps, she would find out why.
HOPE COULD NOT move. To her left, Alishia had disappeared in the grasp of the tumbler, rolling downhill and into the smoke that was drifting across the valley from the ruined machine. The female Mage, reclothed in flesh and rage, had gone in pursuit of the tumblers. Her screams still echoed around the valley. Before Hope, the male Mage was fighting the Nax. And Hope was trapped between them all, apart from the action, unable to do anything but watch.
Though grotesquely burnt, the Mage still possessed enormous strength. The Nax circled him like wisps of red smoke, gushing fiery breaths, lashing out with bladed appendages and spiked wings, bounding from the ground and trying to confuse him with their rapid twists and turns. But the Mage fended off every attack, his own limbs moving faster than Hope could see. The fight was vicious and brutal, every move a death strike, every counter a desperate defense.
Hope felt useless. In this clash of monsters she was nothing, a human smear on a battlefield the likes of which Noreela had never seen before. The Cataclysmic War had been humans against the Mages and their Krotes. No tumblers, no Nax. Just the humans, as though the land had been content to leave them to clear up their own mess.
Something had changed this time, and Hope was glad.
She looked around the valley, trying to spot the tumbler that had carried Alishia away. She was desperate to believe that the tumblers had come to help, but it was still a stretch of the imagination that she found difficult to make. This was Kang Kang. Bad things happened here, and perhaps this was fate’s final cruel twist in their wretched story: so close to saving the land, then whipped away by a tumbler and never seen again.
But the Mageswanther dead, Hope thought. So why run after her when she’s in the grip of a tumbler? No escape from them. Never. She saw hints of movement between drifting smoke across the valley, and she tried to project its path, looking at a clear spread of hillside and waiting for something to arrive.