And then suddenly it found what it sought. There were many minds displaced and it passed them all-most were tired and introverted and alone. But this one… this one soared. It traveled in memory and reveled in knowledge. It hunted new ideas, not content to make do with the old. It was a mind that knew the potency of the past and the promise of the future.
The shade noticed it, and the mind was aware of being noticed. It was rich and wide, and suddenly the shade knew emotion-real fear, real freedom-and it lurched. Its own would-be mind stumbled away through the darkness, and when it settled, the mind it sought had withdrawn, back down into the world of reality.
The shade was not concerned. It had dipped out to the world many times now, and it was no longer afraid. It would seek out this mind and find room in there for itself.
There it would sit, and listen, and wait.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 11
LUCIEN MALINI WASless than a man and more than human. His single-minded drive, his reason for being, the one true aim that informed his waking hours and haunted him when he slept, had driven him mad long ago. Madness was no hardship for his kind; indeed, most of them welcomed its inevitable grasp. It focused the mind, excluded all outside considerations and drew everything down to a point. That point was as sharp as the tools of killing he carried, and just as deadly. And though insane, his mind was powerful and vibrant-and put to one task, it pursued it doggedly. He often spent days sitting and meditating on the purpose of his life. There were times when he shed his understanding of any language, any sight that did not in some way appertain to his cause. And this guided him unerringly to his end result.
Lucien could go without food and water for a full moon, such was his mind’s manic grasp over his body. Its dedicated train of thought, consideration, philosophizing was so powerful that it could take control of his physical self, stretching the laws that governed its use and limits and, if damage was ever great, it could steer it ever onward until death overcame even madness. He knew that it would be a grand struggle.
This madness also bred hatred. The extremity of his dedication transformed any intellectual consideration of his cause into an all-encompassing loathing, a rich, blood-hot despising of the target. And that target was magic. His abhorrence of it was bred into him and handed down from those who had first committed themselves to its eradication. He had perpetuated and enriched that hate.
It applied also to those who purported to carry magic. They were equally sullied, equally guilty.
Lucien hugged his red robe around him and started down into the valley that harbored a subject of this hate, a carrier, the first true carrier for a generation. This was what he was made for. Today would be the culmination of his life.
Soon, when he knew that the others were ready, he would move. He would enter the sprawling, degraded town of Pavisse to find Rafe Baburn.
THE RED MONKShad no god. They worshipped no deity, ascribed to no doctrine, prostrated themselves at the feet of nothing. They feared magic, though that was no devil, and their dogma preached little save the expunging of this fear. They worked for the land, though the land had not asked that of them. The Monks knew that magic was the true way of things, yet still they sought its exclusion.
If they had true enemies, they were the Mages Angel and S’Hivez, who had taken magic to themselves and twisted it far past the flexing that the laws of nature were prepared to withstand. They had broken it over the rock of their own vanity. The Monks hated them fiercely, and they harbored no love for anyone to provide balance. Theirs was a philosophy of negativity, a religion-if it could be called such-where destruction was a high command. Seeking magic, courting its return, that was heresy, because should magic return, there would always be evil to take it again. And heresy deserved the ultimate vengeance.
During the Cataclysmic War, the Monks’ predecessors had fought alongside those desperate to save and protect Noreela. The Mages’ power had been strong, their perverted use of magic more powerful and deadly than anything the Noreelans could muster. The Monks’ ancestors-pagan priests and academics who drove the war machines, combining and communing with the great constructs as they battled the Krote hordes of the Mages’ armies-died quickly and painfully, as did their charges. For while the magic of the land drove the machines and gave them power, the Mages’ twisting of this magic gave them an edge: more power; greater strength; the transgressing of life and death itself to expand their armies at an exponential rate. When one Krote fell, two would rise in his place: his revivified physical self and his soul, the wraith captured and tortured by the Mages.
Yet somehow, Noreela won out. The Mages were driven north, out along The Spine, until there was nowhere left to flee. The remnants of their armies commandeered ships and sailed them burning into the unknown. And then magic left the land.
Those pagan priests that survived the fighting had seen firsthand what magic could accomplish in the hands of the Mages. They had had their own close bonds with the machines cruelly broken, and now they were adrift. Nature had betrayed their trust and faith, and their beliefs mutated into an abiding hatred. Slowly, over a few years, the survivors drew together, knowing what had to be done. Magic was gone and it must never return, not while there was even the slightest chance that the Mages could reacquire what they had once ruled, start again where they had left off.
The priests went mad. The Red Monks rose from their madness, feeding upon it and dressing themselves in its color. They became ghosts of the Cataclysmic War, wandering the land, searching for hints of magic’s return. Vowing, with every breath they took, to put it down.
The Monks became something of a myth, fading away into the past in the company of other truths. They hid away in their retreats, keeping watch, and if ever magic was hinted at in the land, they investigated.
These past days, the Red Monks had been sighted all across Noreela.
A FLASH FROMthe opposite hillside told Lucien that the time had come.
He shifted his sword and signaled back, and then he saw movement as the other dozen Monks began their descent from the hills into Pavisse. They had encircled the mining town, remaining high up so they would not be spotted, keeping to old sheebok trails and finding concealed places to await the signal to move. This was a much more coordinated effort than their assault on the farming village over the hills. There, Carfallo had gone in on his own instead of awaiting the arrival of his brethren. He had obviously believed that he could take the village singly-and he had-but he had also allowed escapees. Lucien and the other Monks were not concerned at the number of people that had escaped Carfallo’s fury. What they were concerned about was that one of them was Rafe Baburn. They had met at Trengborne as arranged, entered the village quickly when they saw what had happened, stepping past and through the destruction that held little surprise for them. There in the trading square of the village, surrounded by his stiffening victims, they had found Carfallo. Lucien had sworn that he was dead, such were the profusion of arrows and bolts and swords in his body. The dust around and beneath him was blackened, as if a huge bruise were slowly spreading across the ground, and his face was pierced and parted where the shafts had done their damage.
“No Baburn,” he had whispered, and then his last bubbling gasp shook his body, rattling arrow shafts and scraping lines in the mucky dust. He had waited for their arrival before dying.
The Red Monks had remained in the village that evening, planning their next move, confident that no one would return. And if a few brave stragglers did come back to try to bury their dead, then that was simply more blood for the Monks’ swords. For them, the colors of blood and madness were much the same.
The Monks knew many arcane things. Their divinations and interrogative techniques went far beyond torture and threat, extending past boundaries normally reserved for dead magic or living legend. The trails they followed were always cold and covert, and this one-although they still believed that Baburn was unaware of his legacy, his destiny-was no exception. It was that very ignorance that kept him from them. They had sensed the emergence of magic, their utter hatred of its promise lending it the characteristics of an unknown color, an impossible sound in their thoughts. But given that the boy knew nothing of the potential stirring in his head, to track it was nigh on impossible. They had to use techniques perfected by their ancestors as they spent lifetimes seeking magic. Sometimes dregs were found: a witch here, with a hint of enchantment about her; a girl there, finding her monthly cycle and with it a closeness to the land, a sight she could use to predict. The Red Monks tracked them down and destroyed them all, often annihilating those around them as well. There was always a risk that the magic had spread, like the disease they believed it to be. And even if that were not the case, death was meaningless to the Monks, and easy to mete out.