THE MESSAGE CAMEsoon after they had left Pavisse.
If Kosar had had his wits about him, the messenger would have been killed. If he had been paying attention, the witch’s words would have never found their way to him and A’Meer. Many things changed in the land of Noreela that night, and many destinies were entwined. If Kosar had not fallen asleep on his horse, the future may have been a very different place.
He was on a boat, bobbing in the network of drainage ditches he had been digging around Trengborne for thirty years. They had expanded into canals, taking up most of the land and negating their original purpose, but their digging had become a purpose in itself. The boat was of his own making. He rode it alone, pulled along by a horse on the bank, and the people of Trengborne had gathered in the distance to welcome him back from another digging expedition. They had furbats and flowers and bottles of their best wine, and one of them, a boy called Rafe, held two tankards of Old Bastard for both of them to enjoy.
In the distance, past the crowds, the village of Trengborne had changed. When he had left sometime in the past it had been a dead place, filled with people waiting to die, the crops failing and the animals showing ribs through their weak hides. Now…
Now there were things in the village, large and small, fast and slow, moving and still, colorful and bland. Most were solid with pulsing sacs at various points around their constructs, stone mantels bearing dull yellow masses of fleshy parts, shimmering and steaming in the heat. Appendages shifted in the sunlight, turning on multijoints, digging or scraping or building, forming solid curved limbs that propeled them over the ground like carts, except that these steered themselves. Many had long, tapering tendrils sprouting from their bodies, dipping down to touch or pierce the ground, drawing energy, drawing magic. Because these were machines.
“Machines!” Kosar said, but then the people waiting for him along the banks of the canal drew suddenly nearer, and he saw that all but Rafe wore red.
And madness colored their faces.
“MACHINES!” KOSAR SCREAMED, and as his eyes sprang open he tumbled from his horse in shock.
“Kosar,” A’Meer said, “I know where Rafe is.”
The impact had winded him, his foot was tangled in the stirrup, his bare bloody fingers grated with dust, and now A’Meer-half-dead, infected with a poison that may yet kill her-was talking to him. He twisted his foot free and kicked at the horse’s side as it trotted away. Then he glanced back at A’Meer’s horse… and froze.
In the death moonlight he saw a skull raven perched on her back.
“Kosar!” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re still asleep after that fall. Did you hear me? I know where Rafe and the witch are. Help me sit up, and then we have to ride. Ride fast. ”
“Keep still,” Kosar said. “Very still.” He stood slowly, painfully, and started drawing his sword.
“No!” she said. “This is the witch’s message.”
Kosar kept his hand on the hilt of his sword, moving closer to A’Meer’s mount. The raven fluttered its huge wings and he felt the breeze lift his hair. It stared at him with black pearl eyes, reflecting a moon in each. “I don’t understand.”
“It spoke to me when I was unconscious, gave me the witch’s words. They’re camped a few miles north of here.”
“That’s a skull raven.”
“Yes, she gave it the message. She’s a witch, Kosar, she has her ways. Now, please, let me sit on my own. What blood I have left inside me is collecting in my head, and I can’t think straight. At least let me die sitting up.”
“You’re not going to die,” he said.
“I hope not. I don’t know how much worse it is. I feel… strange inside. I think I might be bleeding in there.”
Kosar helped A’Meer down from her horse, the skull raven flapping off to a nearby tree to watch their efforts. It cawed quietly, and Kosar kept glancing its way. He had never been this close to a skull raven, but all the tales he had heard were bad. He did not trust it one bit.
“How did it tell you?”
“In my sleep. In my dream.”
“I had a dream,” he said. “I saw machines in a village filled with Red Monks.”
“We should get there as fast as we can,” she said weakly, leaning against him, smelling like death. “If there is an antidote for this and the witch has it, the sooner I take it the better.”
“And then what?”
“And then we run with Rafe.” She said it simply, matter-of-factly, as if Kosar should have known that all along. Run with Rafe. So that was it? His future was running from murderous Red Monks?
The bird called out again, louder this time, and it was answered from somewhere far away.
A’Meer sat in her saddle, leaning forward so that she almost breathed in the horse’s mane. Kosar found his own horse and remounted, and this time he and A’Meer rode side by side. The skull raven fluttered on ahead, waiting for them, flying on again, never quite losing itself to the dark. It circled overhead once or twice as if catching moonlight.
After hours spent traveling through the night, the bird still hovering but joined now by more shapes, all of them calling quietly, they mounted a small hill and saw the flicker of a campfire at its base.
RAFE WAS THEfirst to hear the horses.
He and Alishia had been watching each other through the dancing flames of the campfire, smiling, glancing away, looking again. Something about her eyes drew him in, but there was a disturbing factor there repulsing him as well, a sense that beneath her outside beauty lay something rotten. If he closed his eyes as she watched him he could smell bad things, feel the breath of the world stuttering against the walls of his heart, hear worried whispers passing through blades of grass, apprehensive heartbeats pulsing from the depths of the land. So he kept his eyes open, and while he knew that she was wrong, the young lad in him reveled in her smile.
The horses came quietly, but not so quiet as to be secretive. He knew who rode them. Hope panicked and Rafe spoke soothingly, reminded her of the skull ravens she had sent out, and soon Kosar and A’Meer rode into the circle of light cast by the fire.
A’Meer was dying.
Kosar took her gently from the horse and asked Hope about cures, antidotes, all the while refusing to see the witch shaking her head. Alishia watched, and Trey sat back in the shadows, keeping away from these new topsiders.
Rafe was told of a deep dread in the fledge miner’s mind. The whispers told him. The echoes of sunlight filled his mind with news.
Something huge was growing inside. It was a potential already fat with possible futures, all of them far wider and deeper than any he had ever dreamed possible. He looked down between his feet at the pale green grass, the dust, the corpse of the land that had been rotting for three centuries since the Cataclysmic War, when the Mages had taken nature’s trust and torn it asunder, corrupting themselves and that trust in the process. And the growing knowledge promised him a second chance. It was still hidden away, developing in safety, but already its tentative tendrils were exploring outward, experiencing Rafe’s own senses instead of feeding sensations to him. He knew the whole world-a million facts and the truth of a million rumors-and it would have driven him mad, had not the world itself been protecting him right then.
He went to A’Meer and she smiled at him, even though she could surely not see him through eyes so bloodshot that they looked black in the firelight. Her face and scalp were networks of raised veins, some of them burst and hemorrhaging beneath her skin, filling her insides with life-giving blood that would soon kill her.
“All because of me,” Rafe said, but A’Meer kept smiling because she knew who and what he was.
And then he touched her.
THE SHADE SAW, and rose to the fore. Alishia stood and screamed, an exhalation of pure rhapsody, because the shade knew that it saw the future: its life, long and everlasting; its potential, realized again and again; its reward from its god, all of it earned, given and taken freely and with love.