Rafe frowned. “A graveyard,” he said.
Filled with questions, none of them spoke.
Hope led off, driving the horse slightly slower than before. Panic was still there for all of them, but it was more controlled now, more ordered.
Kosar spurred his horse on, clasping the comatose girl between his arms. There was hardly any weight to her at all. He was surprised that she was not dead. He wondered what was going on inside her head, whether those whispering things had invaded as deep as her dreams, and he hoped that she was well.
Trey ran alongside, his long legs eating up the ground.
Ahead, Rafe rested his head against Hope’s back and seemed to sleep.
SOMETHING WAS COMING.
Rafe felt smaller, slighter and yet more significant than ever before. His whole body tingled, outside and in, and he felt the thing that lay deeper than his own mind expand to fill his soul, edges ripping and rippling, promising imminent release. He felt on the verge of a mental orgasm, a spewing of knowledge and magic and something new. He was sick and elated, terrified and enchanted; and the knowledge that something was ready to show itself drove his heart into a frenzy.
Still mindless, still needing protection and guidance, the magic inside was ready to emerge.
“It’s coming,” Rafe whispered, but in the tumult of the chase nobody heard. It did not matter. They would know soon enough. “It’s coming.”
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 26
THE FLEETING SHAPEemerged from behind a tree ahead of him, the air whispered and an arrow embedded itself in Lucien Malini’s neck.
He tried to scream past the wooden shaft, but blood bubbled in his throat and sprayed from his mouth. The agony was intense, its taste raw and satisfying, and as he fell to the forest floor Lucien’s rage closed around the pain and drew strength. His rage grew, making the pain a good thing, something he could subsist on even while his blood leaked and eventually clotted, thickened by fury, holding the arrow tight. He stood again, staggered sideways into a tree, screeched as the shaft struck the trunk and twisted in his flesh.
His skin burned, his scalp was tight and on fire, his muscles twitched and knotted with pent energy, and when he began to run his speed was borne of wrath.
Those dreams came again-images of people he had killed, women he had taken, the pathetic, quivering flesh-things that had died in their dozens on the end of his sword-and the whispers deep in his mind were confused, shocked and yet unable to let go. Lucien held them there. The images came faster, but rather than guilt and shame he felt only triumph.
He saw the Shantasi darting from behind a tree and roared his warning to the other Red Monks. The scream split the arrow shaft in his throat and sprayed bloody splinters at the pines. A flash of red to his right, a shimmer of movement to his left, and the Monks closed in.
His sword sang and vibrated with bloodlust. A squirrel jumped from a tree into his path, and Lucien struck out, slashing it in two. Another arrow whistled in, glancing from his cheek and taking a chunk of flesh as it spun away. Lucien laughed.
More memories, more deaths, dredged from the depths of his mind and forgotten merely because there were so many to remember.
There was a scream from ahead, the clash of sword on sword, the flash of sparks flying in the shade beneath the trees. Lucien coughed more blood and splinters and ran to join the fray.
“THE GRAVEYARD,” HOPEsaid. “Oh Mage shit, I never in my life expected to really see this. I never believed it.”
But Rafe was leaning against her back, asleep or unconscious, and it was for her to make sense of what she saw. The other horse drew near and she heard Kosar gasp. Trey ran up between them, panting, his breath slowing as he looked at what lay before them.
They had left the gray forest several minutes before, and followed a gradual slope up to the crest of a small hill. Now, in a natural bowl in the land before them, lay the graveyard to which Rafe had brought them.
There were no markers here, no headstones or monuments or mausoleums to the hundreds of machines that lay dead in the heather and grass. Their hollowed carcasses almost covered the ground entirely, starting from a hundred steps down the hilltop from where the observers stood, sweeping into the craterlike valley and then climbing the slopes on all sides, here and there actually lying dead on the hills surrounding the hollow. Some looked as if they had been consumed by fire in their last moments, stony protrusions burned black and melted smooth by the heat. Others had died and rotted down slowly, settling into their final resting places as the living tissues that supported them slowly returned to dust. The smallest machine was as large as a man, its spindly iron legs rusted centuries ago into its final stance, and now almost rotted through by the trials of time and climate. Its shell held only air now, where before its workings had merged in metallic and biologic symphony. There were constructs the size of a horse, others even larger, and one, in the low center of the valley, that must have shaken the very ground it once rolled across. It was as large as a dozen farm wagons, its smooth stone shell curved and notched like the carapace of a giant beetle. Its back bore holes at regular intervals, and a few of them were surrounded by the bony stumps of what may once have been legs, or other less obvious limbs.
The land had continued to grow around this place of death and decay. Grasses grew strangely long and lush on the valley floor, fed perhaps by the water that must gather there from the rains. Bushes and small trees had forced their way between and through the dead machines, protruding from gaps in the constructs’ bony skeletons and metal cages, pressing through cracks where perhaps there should be none, doing their best to subsume these echoes from the past into this stranger, less happy present. Several large trees had sprouted here since the Cataclysmic War, their roots set deep, their boughs and trunks grown around or through dead things. One trunk had split in two and joined again, trapping within itself the rusting metal limb of a large handling device. It clasped the iron like a wound holds an arrow, and though sickened by the rusting metal its growth still seemed a success.
The shades of old machines-the grays of stone, blackened fire-stained limbs, the dark orange of rusting things-were complemented by the brave greenery of the plants trying to hide them from sight. Giant red poppies speckled the solidified hide of one machine like recent wounds. Yet the dead could never be truly hidden. They were too many, too large, and now a permanent part of the landscape.
“They came here to die,” Hope said.
“They’re machines, ” Kosar said. “They must have been brought here. It’s a rubbish yard, not a graveyard. They’re machines, they were brought here… they can’t have come on their own.”
“Why not?” Trey asked. “It was ancient magic that made them, not people. Can we say what they could and couldn’t do?”
“They came here to die,” Hope said again. “Lost, knowing the Cataclysmic War was its end, magic brought them here to die.”
“However they got here,” Kosar said, “why has Rafe brought us here?”
“Maybe we can hide,” Trey said. “That huge one down there, it must have a whole network inside, plenty of places to crawl into and hide.”
“He said magic was going to make us believe,” Hope said. “There’s something else here, not just a hiding place. And the Monks would never give in. It may take them days, but they’d find us.”
“He also said that he might take us away,” Kosar said.
Hope turned in her saddle and nudged Rafe, almost smiling at how she was treating the carrier of new magic. “Wake up!” she said. “Rafe
… farm boy… wake up!” He was not asleep. His breath was too fast for that, his eyes half-open, his hands clasped tight in his lap, so tight that a dribble of blood ran from his fist.