And yet… no magic. Only tricks and turns, deceptions and delight in ruse. She could mix and match well after all these years, curing with products of the land and, if required, creating ills as well. She did a fair trade in her medicines, and earned even more from the occasional, more unpleasant commission. The sex, though, the whoring, that was where her true pay originated. The gathering of knowledge, the search for a hint that magic had returned and things were about to change.
And now here was a boy asleep in her room, a boy who had apparently escaped the endless wrath of a Red Monk. A boy who heard unknown voices, felt unknowable sensations deep in his naive farmer’s mind. He could explain none of it, yet his exposed stomach explained it all.
Breathing heavily, Hope knelt before Rafe and started to undo his belt. He grumbled a little in his sleep and whispered something she did not understand. Her excitement grew. Words of old! she thought. She slipped his trousers down slowly, glancing at his pale limp cock.
He has no navel.
There could be other explanations. She had missed it, perhaps, or a trick was being played, a complex deception for the amusement of some of her regular customers, those of whom she always asked her questions, again and again as if they would suddenly remember.
But she looked again.
He has no navel!
“Mage shit, it’s really here.” The tattoos on Hope’s face were in flux, shifting and moving as her emotions swayed from fear to elation, delight to terror. Here was the living future, and the dead past. This boy was more myth than reality, a story so rare that she had never heard it told other than by her own mother and grandmother. Magic is destined to return, they had said, and it will be in a child unbirthed, offspring of the womb of the land in darkest Kang Kang. She had never truly understood what that meant, but now she was faced with the myth in the flesh.
For a few seconds Hope held her breath, terrified that Rafe would simply disappear. She had realized the impossibility of his being here; perhaps that knowledge would drive him away. But he remained, squirming on the bed and frowning as he tried to make sense of some deeply hidden dream, a recurring voice in his head that must be trying so hard to make itself known.
Hope held his cock and squeezed slightly, feeling it grow hard in her hand, the incredible heat as his blood coursed through his body, driven by the turmoil of his dreams and drawn to this point. When it was fully hard she stood and raised her skirts. She could take him inside her, have his seed, and what would that make her? A part of things? More than just a witch without magic, a fool mixing herbs and chanting mock hope back at herself? She waited for long seconds, poised, staring down at the boy’s face and seeing conflict etched there in his skin. Her own tattoos itched as she fought her own private battle.
She did not know what would happen, what she would gain, if she took him now. But she knew what she would lose: his trust.
She covered him up with a smooth furbat-skin blanket.
“Sleep easy,” she said. “Get what rest you can. Listen to the voices, but don’t let them frighten you.”
She looked at the paraphernalia of her life once again-all suddenly redundant, like so much medicine pumped into a dead person’s veins-and then sat back to watch Rafe sleep.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 9
IT DID NOTtake long for Alishia to decide to leave Noreela City.
With the library gone, she no longer had a job. She had saved a good hoard of tellans over the past few years, but in a city like Noreela she could not live on them forever. And besides, there was little for her there now. Her books were gone, burned to ash by the old madman, and it was as if their destruction had brought her back to the present. She began to see just how bad things were. Before, she had seen the city on her walks to and from the library, and that was all. Now, aimless and wandering, she had more of a chance to register what she saw, to actually be a part of things instead of being lost in the histories of her books. She felt vulnerable and alone. She felt unprotected. Erv, the stable lad, had become even more threatening, sensing her vulnerability and perhaps intending to prey upon it given the first opportunity.
Alishia had started carrying her knife in a sheath on her thigh, hidden by her dress. That single act of insecurity and fear had in itself persuaded her that her time in the city was at an end.
Besides, she was alone. Her parents had passed away when she was a teenager, leaving her a pile of books and living memories, but little else. These memories had kept her going while she made new ones of her own, and eventually she had found employ with the library. She had few friends, and certainly no one close. She had never been beyond the city walls, and only rarely even ventured outside her own district. Alishia lived in her head, exploring the realms of fantasy revealed by the books she read, the accounts of things near and far that were sometimes truth, sometimes fiction, and more often one disguised as the other. Her own private world was a rich one, yet she had hardly seen the real world at all.
There was little for her to leave behind and even less to take. She bought a horse and saddle, spending a sizeable proportion of her savings, and stabled it with Erv the night before she left. It would carry her and her few clothes and books out of the city and into the unknown.
Alishia did not sleep that night. She lay awake and listened to the sounds of the nighttime city-the laughter, the whispering, the shouting, the screams and calling, the dogs barking in shadowy alleys, the grunting of fights, the smashing of glass, the rumble of carts and the lethargic clatter of clumsily shod horses passing by-and she felt less a part of it than ever. Somewhere deep inside she had something that this place eschewed: hope. Not purely for herself, but a wider belief that things could get better. And that set her apart from many of the inhabitants of Noreela City. They seemed content to exist in a world running down, where fields yielded less each year and murder grew more common, where the Tumbling Window was busier month by month with executions for more petty crimes, where children died in the streets because parents would no longer give them a home. If there were others like her who wished for good rather than accepted bad, they were a silent minority.
The following morning, when she left, Erv tried to give her a kiss. Nervous, she allowed him to brush her cheek with his lips. He blushed and muttered an inept apology.
“Good-bye, Erv,” Alishia said. She felt ridiculously grateful, and surprised. She had grown to fear the boy and the potential violence she had sensed in him, yet now he seemed more pathetic than dangerous. She wondered whether her suspicions had been a product of her underlying mistrust of Noreela City.
“Where you going, Ally?”
“I don’t know yet.” Erv did not respond. Alishia and he stood facing each other for a few awkward moments, and then he made a cradle with his hands so that she could mount her horse. Her ride was well watered and groomed, and the saddle had been polished, the harnesses tightened and shined where brass fittings clanked together. Alishia smiled at Erv as she settled herself atop the horse. It was years since she had last ridden, and already it was uncomfortable.
“Take care, Erv,” she said, and she kneed the horse from the cobbled courtyard.
She had expected to feel sad as she left the city, but she did not. Instead, she was instilled with a vivid excitement, a tingling belief that she was leaving behind all that was stale and familiar and unpleasant, and that past the plains surrounding the city were fresh experiences to be had. She knew that the rot had spread right across Noreela, but quitting Noreela City felt like ridding herself of the most concentrated source of failing, a heavy, black influence that would drag her down in the end. Perhaps she had survived because she had never truly lived there; in her mind, in her books, she was an inhabitant of Noreela as a whole, not just a city.