It’s good to be scared, Lenora thought. That was what Angel had told her. The Mages had always been a formidable presence, but now.. . now they were something so much more. There was something so dreadfully wrong about the exiled Shantasi and his ex-lover that Lenora found it difficult to look directly at them. It was as though light was repelled from their skin. She thought of the shapes she had seen in the vision, those two twisting wraiths aboard the bone boat on a lake of Noreela’s blood, but she shook her head and looked again.
The ground had started to glow beneath the Mages’ hands. The surface was stripped, dust and smaller rocks flitting away as if forced by a strong wind. They stung Lenora’s lower legs but there was nowhere she could go to avoid the rush. She dared not move. This was something she had to see, and she realized now what the Mages were doing: displaying their power to the Krotes assembled here. They could have landed and talked to their warriors, but a discussion of the magic they again possessed was nothing compared to a demonstration.
Lenora stepped back several paces. Her eyes widened, her heart skipped a few beats, and the many wounds on her exposed skin tingled with something approaching excitement. This is when we see, she thought. This is when they really show us what they can do. Already they’ve touched the sky. Now it’s the turn of the ground.
The Mages began to rise from their knees to their feet, hands maintaining contact with the ground as though stuck there, and then slowly they straightened their backs, lifting their hands and seemingly bringing part of the ground with them.
Light burned into the dusk, and each of the Mages’ hands was lifting a column of fluid stone. The ground vibrated as the Mages’ actions upset the balance of the land. Rock growled and crumbled, and strange rainbows were cast in the dust clogging the atmosphere. Angel laughed, and S’Hivez’s muttering became louder, the words revealing themselves as something much less complex than a spell. It’s all coming back, he said, again and again. His voice ground stone together, and then the two Mages turned to face each other and began to work their hands.
Lenora could feel the heat from the molten rock from where she stood, and she saw other Krotes stepping back as their skin stretched and reddened. The Mages began to mold it, twisting their hands here and there, moving their arms through impossible angles, pushing and pulling, prodding with stiffened fingers and picking with long nails, smoothing with palms and nudging with the heels of their hands. And between them something began to take shape. Sharp edges appeared from nowhere; curves hardened; a globe of rock rose up on thin stony stilts. Angel laughed again, and Lenora shivered.
The Mages stepped away from each other, allowing the rock room to move and grow. More flowed from the ground, urged by a simple gesture from S’Hivez, and they molded this around the form already there, thickening the trunk and lengthening limbs. They added more, and more again, and then S’Hivez stepped back and lowered his hands.
He looks tired, Lenora thought. They have this, they have their twisted magic, but they’re not used to using it. S’Hivez looked at her through the heat haze, and she saw the black pits of his eyes. He scowled. She looked away, her skin crawling, scalp tightening as if the old wound there were about to reopen and spill her treacherous brain to the ground. A thought came, and she could do nothing to hold it back: He can hear me. She did not look at the old Shantasi Mystic to see whether this was true.
“Lenora!” Angel called. “A present for you, and it will be ready soon.” She threw a punch at the sea and a huge splash rose in the twilight, glowing silver and yellow in the moons’ contrasting light. Krotes ducked down as the wave crashed against the harbor wall, tumbling over and rumbling across the ground until it broke around the glowing sculpture.
The stone hissed as its superheated framework was suddenly cooled. There were cracks and explosions, and the sounds that came from the thing were almost those of something alive. And if it did have life, it was in pain.
Lenora could not hold back her own accompanying shout.
As the hissing steam died away, Angel appeared by her side. She leaned close to Lenora, and her breath was as warm as the stone she had just cooled. “It’s yours,” she said. “Your machine, your ride, and soon I’ll give it a life.” She turned away from Lenora and surveyed the assembled Krotes. “You’ll all have one!” she said. “Machines of war for you to do what you’ve always been ready to do: take Noreela. Soon the ships will be here, and your fellow Krotes will follow you east and south and west. I name every one of you here a captain, and Lenora is now your Mistress. You answer to her, and she will answer to us. And the rewards at the end of this short war will be beyond imagining.” She turned back to Lenora and smiled. “I’m giving you my army,” she said, “and I ask that you use it well. I know your intentions, Lenora. I know your aims. I know what you hear and what speaks to you, but I ask that you ignore that calling until you have fulfilled your purpose. You’re here for me, and because of me.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Lenora whispered. Not long to wait, she thought. And she hoped that the shade of her dead child heard the promise in those words.
“And now… life for your war machine.” Angel walked back to the fallen hawk with the dead boy on its back. “Oh, S’Hivez,” she said, laughing, “even you must appreciate the symbolism of this!”
The Mage laid one hand on the hawk and the other on the dead farm boy’s arm. Beneath her hands the flesh of both began to shimmer and ripple, and soon the stench of cooking meat once again permeated the air across Conbarma. She moved back slowly, melted flesh sticking to her hands and flowing like thick honey, and then swivelled and thrust her hands at the stone sculpture.
Flesh flowed. Blood misted the air and moved as if blown by a strong wind. Bones cracked and ruptured, spinning through the air and impacting the rock, delving their way inside and crackling again as they fused back together. The flesh of the boy and the hawk melded and filled out the fighting machine, flooding hollows within its rocky construct and then building layer upon layer across its outside. Blood greased its joints. The dead hawk shrank as more of its flesh was scoured away, and the boy’s corpse came apart.
Angel lowered her hands and stepped back. Lenora saw that she was panting slightly, her shoulders stooped just a little too much, and she wondered again at how much this new magic was draining the Mages. But then Angel turned and looked at her, and behind her smile Lenora saw a strength she had never witnessed before. Not just physical strength-Angel had always been strong-but strength of purpose. There was no doubt in Angel, and no fear. She was unstoppable.
“Here it is,” Angel said. She pointed back at the machine. “And here you are.”
Lenora fell to her knees. She clasped her hands to her head and pressed, trying to squeeze out the thing she felt inside, the living, squirming thing. She was suddenly intimately aware of the life that had just been created, and even as she felt Angel’s calming touch and heard her soothing words, she knew that this was not something that was ever meant to be.
Take care, Angel whispered in her mind, you’re strong, Lenora, and this is feeble and weak-a machine, a tool for you to command and use. It lives like an animal down a hole, not like a proud Krote come to conquer and claim. Its life is less than a hawk’s shit, but you and it are linked now by this touch. And Angel left her mind, leaving that link in place.
Lenora gasped and went to fall forward, but Angel was at her side with a helping hand. The Mage helped her to stand and then leaned in close, whispering once again: “You need to be strong.” It was a command, not a request.