He heard the hiss of arrows and discs cutting through the air, the thudding as they impacted flesh, the harder thunks as skulls were pierced and spines severed. Ahead of him, one of his friends was pinned to the air by a dozen arrows. When the woman turned slowly and stared at Jossua where he was stuck in the mud, another slew of arrows hit her from behind and tore her apart. He had remembered and forgotten her features a thousand times since then, as if recollection could do the same as a clutch of arrows.
Then there was the sea of wounded gathered in a small valley away from the main fight. There were thousands there, dozens expiring each minute. The Mages’ unnatural machines and Krote soldiers used an unidentified poison, and even when the injured could be brought out, they were simply laid down to die. No food, no water, no comfort; that was all spared for those not yet doomed. Jossua made several trips with wounded people on his back. They screamed when they died. Their hands clawed at the air for help that would never come. Over the days that valley became a landscape of frozen, stiffened corpses; no flies or carrion, a still tableau of corrupted flesh and poison still effective in death.
He saw a dead dog. Someone must have brought their pet with them and lost it as soon as the hellish fighting began. It was a mongrel, clean and cared for. There was no sign of injury on its body, and its face was not contorted with the pain of a poisoned death. It hunkered beneath a tree, huddled between exposed roots, cold, stiff. There was a calmness to the scene, an oasis in the storm of battle. He wondered what had killed it. He never found out.
And then a memory of the Mages and a thousand Krotes bursting from their keep. Unnatural light exploded in pockets across the battlefield, spitting fiery balls that consumed flesh and metal alike. Their monstrous war machines shook the blood-soaked battlefield as if it were a blanket laid across the earth, sending the people’s army tumbling and leaving them defenseless against the Krotes’ tainted swords and spears. A brief roar of victory had gone up at the sight of the Mages leaving their fortress, but it quickly died as the Krotes went about their work. Strange things roamed the battlefield: machines with a screaming bloodlust all their own; shadows that may have been wraiths; fiery balls of magic, bright and yet somehow unclean. And the death dealt that day was as diverse as the lives it took away. The Mages themselves… Jossua saw them sat astride flying things that shit fireballs and pissed poison across the besieging hordes… He saw them…
Much later, he rode a machine into battle. The people had regrouped and magic itself had somehow fought back, offering a final limited burst of pure power and denying the Mages’ control one last time. The tide had turned and Jossua was a warrior now, the memory of his former life smothered by weeks of battle and rage. The machine marched on giant flaming legs, graceful and deadly, and he and his squadron harried at the fleeing Mage army’s flanks. Men fell beneath his ride’s molten feet, their charred corpses sometimes carried along for several miles and providing a cushioned footfall for its rapid sprint. Jossua howled. He felt his face burning with the fury, and even people from his own side moved to let him through. He was a berserker; invincible, unbeatable. When he killed a Krote he drank his or her blood. And he fed well.
His final, abiding memory of that long time of war and death was sitting on the shores of the island in The Spine that would become known as Mages’ Bane. His machine lay dead and already rotting behind him, its purpose fulfilled. Magic had withdrawn itself earlier that day, and hundreds had instantly fallen on their swords, sighing as they died. The sense of hopelessness and catastrophe was enormous, and everything suddenly seemed very different. It felt as though any purpose in existence had suddenly gone. A flower he found growing on the beach was rotten, the sun was weak and oily on his skin, a bird drifted down into the sea and did not resurface. The sense of victory and hope he had felt at finally driving the Mages away was brief, because their defeat brought Noreela no victory. All it brought was the sudden absence of magic, and the sense that all good things had come to an end.
Around him, sprouting from the sand like sapling trees and bobbing gently in the waves, were ten thousand torn bodies. Noreelans and Krotes were equalled in death. Here and there were survivors, all of them as silent as he. They stood amongst the monuments of the dead. And in the distance, still visible as a haze on the horizon, the Mages’ burning ships showed their tails as they fled Noreela forever.
So long ago. So many moons, and here he was, still alive. Still waiting. His purpose as fresh as ever, his rage as inflammatory as it had been all those years before.
Jossua Elmantoz passed deeper into the Monastery, the former Mages’ keep, wondering what he would find when he next viewed daylight.
THINGS IN THEbasements, one of the younger Monks had said. Forms shifting, shadows moving the wrong way, the smell of turned earth and scorched rock. And then something new.
Jossua was an old man. He barely had the strength to leave his rooms anymore, let alone travel down through the huge Monastery. Too many steps, too many uneven tunnels, known and unknown. And yet, this he could not ignore. A Nax was too dangerous to disregard.
He went on his own. He could have used help, he was not afraid to admit that, but he was the Elder. There were responsibilities to uphold. And the younger Monks had not been able to hide their relief when he instructed them to remain behind.
Prepare, he had said. Soon you will go out into the land. Your task is at hand. Your lives are about to find meaning.
He had already passed through the real basements and entered the long, declining tunnel that led deeper into the bedrock. His torch flared brightly, lighting the way and striving to blind him at the same time. The ground was uneven here, and he had to walk slowly to keep from falling. This was harder than negotiating the staircases in the Monastery. At least they had been even, if difficult. Here a ridge of stone could surprise him into a fall, an unseen hollow could twist his ankle and break his old man’s bones. If he hurt himself down here, he could not imagine the Monks venturing this deep to find him. His torch would burn down, burying him in darkness. The cold would kill him.
He had never been this deep. He paused and moved the torch around, taking in his surroundings. Water dripped from the tunnel walls, ran from several deep cracks in the stone and gurgled away down the tunnel, contained in ditches formed on either side of the path. Black moss grew around the cracks from which the water issued. Small silver shapes darted across the walls, nibbling at the moss, moving away, encountering one another and touching antennae. The light did not bother them because they were blind. Perhaps they could sting. Jossua left them to their feast.
His limbs were aching and his heart fluttered weakly in his chest, sending spasms of pain into his arms and shoulders. He paused and stood within the circle of light from his torch. Beyond that the darkness was total; it could hide anything. If there were eyes out there watching him, they closed when he looked their way, so as not to reflect the flames.
The walls here were almost totally smooth, but for the cracks where time had shifted them and stresses had forced them open. This was no natural cave, and yet it did not carry the tool marks that would be so evident had it been manually dug. Machines had made this place, Jossua knew. Perhaps those of the Mages-the thought of them walking this corridor, taking up the same space as he, made him feel sick-or perhaps they had been formed many generations ago, for whatever original reason the keep had been built. There were no true records of when or why the place had been constructed, nor by whom, although over the decades the Monks had discovered several distinct layers in the structure. The deeper they went, the older the period of the building’s birth, until the basement held its origins in the dim mists of prehistory. A place of worship some said, although to which god or demon they could not say. A retreat, others claimed, a castle and keep wherein safety could be found from outside aggressors. The Mages had thought that to be the case and yet even they, with all their twisted power, had been driven out.