More light poured out from the machine, the ground shaking with each eruption, and as it impacted the hawk’s hide it flowed and manifested into more stinging, biting things. The hawk shuddered and the Mage lashed out, sending bits of shattered bodies raining back down between the ribs.
Kosar brushed scorpion tails from his hair, spider legs from his face, and they melted into the dark. He felt helpless. The sword vibrated in his hand.
The Mage fell from the hawk’s body and jammed between two of the ribs. At first Kosar thought it was dead, poisoned by the things magically flung at it by the machine, or perhaps bled dry by the newly formed swarm of bats that harried its head. But then it stretched out its arms and started hacking at the ribs with heavy serrated swords, and Kosar knew that this thing was unstoppable.
It ignored the light exploding across its body, shunned the things biting and tearing and poisoning. It ignored everything but the person lying directly below it: Rafe.
“Trey!” Kosar shouted. “It’s coming through! Your disc-sword can reach it, cut it before its free!”
Trey nodded, looked up at the Mage, back at Kosar, fear and doubt in his eyes.
“Trey!”
And then the Mage was through. With a rending of metal on bone it ripped aside the ribs and fell to the ground inside the machine. Small creatures scurried from its body and flittered away into shreds of light and dark. Another purple pulse crashed into it, but the Mage grinned and it simply faded away.
As Kosar ran at the Mage, sword ready before him, Trey lashed out. His disc-sword caught the Mage across the shoulder and split leather and skin. It fell to its knees. Kosar struck with his sword and felt the grinding hold of bone as it entered the Mage’s chest. He twisted, leaned his weight on the sword to bury it deeper, and the Mage vented a shrill scream.
“Yes!” Trey shouted. He swung his disc-sword again and took off three of the Mage’s fingers. “Yes!”
“No!” Hope cried.
Kosar turned. She had thrown herself across Rafe’s body, and at fist the thief could not tell why. But then he saw the black shape thrashing in the disturbed ground, great pawlike hands lifting earth and muck and rock and throwing it aside, and the second Mage quickly emerged into the glow of the machine’s defenses.
It laughed. It had the voice of a beautiful, carefree woman, someone who had found the love of her life.
“Kosar!” Trey shouted, and Kosar turned into the first Mage’s fist. It had stood and thrust Trey aside, striking out at Kosar at the same time, and its fist cracked his cheekbone and toppled him easily to the ground. He dropped his sword.
“You’re not having him!” Hope screeched.
The female Mage snatched up the witch and threw her aside, bent down and scooped up Rafe. It ran at the wound in the machine’s side where the first hawk had struck, and as if finally realizing what was happening the machine let out an onslaught of writhing purple light. It slapped into the Mage and Rafe alike, sticking like mud to clothes, forming into blurry insects and birds, lizards and mammals-all of them biting and killing. The Mage screeched but kept on running.
Rafe remained silent.
“No,” Kosar said, because he knew that this would not happen. After everything, all they had been through, the power of new magic released to protect them from the Monks, A’Meer’s life sacrificed to afford them time, none of this could happen. “No!”
The Mage reached the broken ribs and launched itself out into the dark, open air, Rafe clasped to its chest. More light delved after them from the machine, and dozens of creatures fell, sputtering away into nothing like sparks from a campfire.
“Rafe!” Hope screamed.
Kosar sat up just as the male Mage ran past him. He kicked out but missed its ankles, and it sprinted on. It was waving its hands around its head, batting away a cloud of fluttering things formed of light that were sizzling and sparking across its skin. Screaming, it too jumped from the machine and out into darkness.
Behind Hope’s wails and Trey’s wretched shouts, Kosar listened for the Mages’ falling screams. But he heard nothing. The only sound now was the whimper of their own hopelessness, and the soft, dejected ticking of the heated machine cooling down around them.
LENORA RODE AIRcurrents far below the flying machine. Her hawk was mortally wounded, but she kept it alive with a combination of promises whispered into its ears and pain delivered through her buried sword. The promises were of more pain, not deliverance. The hawk was a creature of instincts, and pain would always be its driver.
Angel’s hawk had already tumbled past her, dead, after she had forced it to bury itself in the machine’s underbelly. The other hawk was still up there somewhere, though she could no longer see its shape around the machine. It was dark down here, and the coolness of the night air stroked the open wounds on Lenora’s body.
It did not take long for Angel to come to her.
Lenora saw the plummeting shape and edged her hawk beneath it, catching Angel and the boy she carried in two of its great webbed tentacles. Seconds later S’Hivez struck the hawk’s back just behind Lenora, sending the creature into its final, fatal dive.
But there was no despair, no fear, no sense that doom was upon them. Because Angel held the boy across her lap like a newborn child, stroking his forehead, waiting for his eyes to open and lifting his hair with one long fingernail as if deciding where to cut. When Rafe’s eyes did open, Angel drew a knife and sawed off the top of his head. She buried her tongue in the boy’s exposed brain.
Mother! a voice said in Lenora’s mind, and there was recognition in that shade at last.
And in the Mage’s ancient eyes, Lenora saw the knowledge that they had won.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 27
THEY DRIFTED THROUGHthe night. A sliver of the life moon and the glorious death moon shone down on the battered machine, both mocking. Stars speckled the sky and added their luminescence. The machine hummed quietly beneath them, shivering occasionally as if damaged or cold. They headed south. Perhaps there was purpose, but more likely it was simply drifting, an aimlessness brought on by sudden, unexpected, impossible defeat.
The Mages had Rafe. The Mages had magic.
Kosar lay back with his eyes closed, thinking of that first day when the Monk had ridden into their village. Back then he had had no idea of the greater workings of things, and even now he understood so little. Everything they thought they knew was supposition, any decisions they had made based upon uncertain thoughts and Rafe’s occasional, mostly unhelpful ideas. Really, he wondered how any of them had ever believed that they stood a chance at all.
A’Meer had been confident and passionate about her cause. Poor, dead A’Meer. Kosar had loved her-he’d always known that really-but it was strange how it took her death to reveal within him the true strength of that love. There was a hole inside, a blackness darker than this night, and it had little to do with Rafe’s capture.
“What now?” he said quietly. Neither Trey nor Hope answered him. Alishia had fallen back to sleep, though color had bled back into her cheeks now, and in the darkness she seemed to smile. They had checked her over after the attack. She was growing physically smaller, younger, regressing into some sort of unnatural childhood, though none of them questioned how far this would go. Just more strangeness to live with. And in truth, only Trey really cared.
More time passed, and the machine bore them ever southward. They would reach Kang Kang soon, Kosar knew, but that did not concern him. He had been there before, and it would be no more dangerous than anywhere else now that the Mages had returned.
Myth, legend, stories to tell children by the camp light, old tales carved onto story-walls in the bigger towns and cities… and terrifying though the stories were, they were always safely harbored in history, cosseted away, buried as surely as the million that had died in that Cataclysmic War so long ago.