Myths were not supposed to return. Legends were never meant to come back to life.
Hope cried quietly in the night, her tears forming strange shapes on her tattoos, but Kosar felt in no mood to comfort her.
Trey sat next to Alishia, staring down at her but seeing something else entirely. Kosar could sense the pain and loss in the miner’s yellowed eyes.
Kosar stood slowly and walked to the edge of the machine, stretching up to look over the membrane between ribs, wondering whether anything had already begun down below.
The land was lost. The Mages had the fledgling magic in their hands, and whatever they did to Rafe to gain control of it-and that didn’t bear thinking about, not at all-it surely would not take long. Perhaps down was up already, and black was white, and life could easily swap places with death. With three centuries to plot their return, the Mages must surely know how revenge would be most effectively wrought.
“What now?” Kosar said again.
“Now Noreela ends,” Trey said. “Everything that happened no longer matters. I almost envy my family and friends, dead down there from the Nax. At least they died at home. And here I am, a miner, flying toward my death high above the surface I never should have seen.”
“This can’t be it,” Kosar said, but he knew the childlike naivete of his words. “Hopeless,” he muttered.
“There’s something about her,” Hope said.
Kosar turned and saw the witch standing above Alishia. Her face was stern, molded by sorrow and anger. “What do you mean?”
“I mean apart from the obvious, the fact that she’s a girl instead of a woman now. However impossible that is, there’s something else. She’s not as ill as she was. She’s looking better. Less asleep. And for a while down there… just for a while… she was awake.”
“Meaning what?” Trey asked. He leaned in close across Alishia as if to protect her from the witch.
Hope stepped back. “We’re going somewhere,” she said. “Have neither of you thought of what’s happening here? The machine is still flying. Magic is still guiding us. Thief, you saw the machines in the valley falling still as soon as we left, their use ended. This flying machine… magic must know that it still has its use.”
“I don’t care,” Trey said. “We couldn’t keep the boy from the Mages, and the four of us will never get him back. That’s for certain.”
Hope looked at Kosar and smiled, shrugged. The expression did not sit well on her face and he turned away, perturbed. Was that hope he had seen there? Greed? Rage? He could not tell. Her tattoos had hidden her true feelings, as always, and she was as much an enigma to him now as ever.
“No matter,” Hope said. “Time will tell. We’ll be in Kang Kang soon.”
Their conversation ended there, and each of them withdrew into their own thoughts. Kosar sat back against a rib and nursed his wounded hand and bleeding fingers. He licked the blood from his fingertips, bearing the brief pain before the soothing sensation overcame them, just for a time. A’Meer had been able to soothe that pain. Sweet, mysterious A’Meer.
He drifted to sleep reliving images from the past, but time treated them differently. He fought the Monk in the village instead of hiding away. He refused to help A’Meer and fled north to the Cantrass Plains. Rafe drowned crossing the San, their journey ended by the wretched faults in nature, not by those that had caused those faults in the first place. And each dream fed into the next with the same sense of incompletion.
WHEN KOSAR WOKEup it was still dark. He saw Trey and Hope standing at the far edge of the machine, staring out through the tattered hole in the ribs.
“How long have I been asleep?” he said. “Feels like hours.”
“It was,” Trey said. “Ten, eleven hours.”
“It should be dawn.” Kosar looked out through the ribs and saw the dark ridges of Kang Kang to the south, their pinnacles biting at the moonlit sky. Then east, out toward New Shanti, where the sun was not.
“It should be,” Hope said, “but it isn’t. No sun today, Kosar. There’ll be no sun today.”
He shook his head, not understanding. Above the eastern horizon there was only a sad smudge, like the memory of life reflected in a pale corpse’s eyes. The rest of the sky was the same sickly hue, redolent of the death moon at its brightest. Kosar held up his hand-he could see the shape, but no real color. He could feel the moonlight on his skin, but there was no warmth.
“I don’t understand.”
“The Mages have made their first move,” Hope said. “What are we, any of us, without daylight?”
THE MACHINE, BORNEby magic, drifted south, edging closer to the peaks of darkest Kang Kang. While Kosar, Hope and Trey watched for a dawn that would not arrive, Alishia slept behind them.
And she dreamed.
Such dark, fearsome dreams.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Lebbon lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include Face, The Nature of Balance, Changing of Faces, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Dead Man’s Hand, Pieces of Hate, Fears Unnamed, White and Other Tales of Ruin, Desolation and Berserk. Future publications include Hellboy: Unnatural Selection from Simon amp; Schuster, and more books with Cemetery Dance, Leisure, Night Shade Books and Necessary Evil Press, among others. He has won two British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Tombstone Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. Several of his novels and novellas are currently under option.
Visit Tim’s website at www.timlebbon.net.
Visit the dedicated website for Dusk and Dawn at www.noreela.com.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Mesmer
The Nature of Balance
Hush (with Gavin Williams)
Face
Until She Sleeps
Desolation
Berserk
White
Naming of Parts
Changing of Faces
Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark)
Dead Man’s Hand
Pieces of Hate
COLLECTIONS
Faith in the Flesh
As the Sun Goes Down
White and Other Tales of Ruin
Fears Unnamed
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Be sure not to miss the stunning sequel to DUSK
by Tim Lebbon
Coming in Spring 2007
Here’s a special preview…
Coming in Spring 2007
FLYING HIGH ABOVENoreela, it was easy to believe that the world had ended again.
The evidence of scattered, scared communities lay spread out below: small villages, a few larger towns, all of them lighting fires against the darkness that should not be. Ten thousand faces would be searching for the sun but seeing only this unnatural dusk, and Lenora wondered what they would think were they to see the hawk. Would they know? Would they have any inkling of who or what they were looking at?
Probably not. But soon that would change.
For most of the night Lenora had been trying to hide from the two Mages. She sat motionless and silent, as far back on the hawk’s tail as she could go without falling off, two short swords buried deep in the creature’s hide to provide precious handholds, and watched her masters with a sense of fear the likes of which she had never felt before. The Mages had changed so much, and they were strangers to her now.
For the past three hundred years Angel and S’Hivez had been bitter, angry and mad, given to lengthy musings on revenge and what it would mean to them. Lenora had served them and listened-their trusted lieutenant-but over time they had become shadows of themselves, bitter old things who showed only occasional flashes of their former brilliance and brutality. Ensconced in their mountain retreat on Dana’Man, they had been fading away, though they had still retained a certain power; things that had once ruled a land could never lose that. And Lenora had still feared them-the mad, sometimes beautiful Angel most of all. But their glories had been fading into the past, and the more time passed, the more her memories of them had been dictated by what they said rather than what she remembered. She had let the Mages’ power become a self-serving myth in her own mind, rather than preserving it as a rich memory. Time staled everything.