Monks cried out, crumpled beneath hawk feet, slashed by the riders’ blades, crushed by machines.
The land swam in blood.
And then slowly, incredibly, the valley began to fall away.
“What in the name of the Black-?” Kosar hissed.
“It’s going,” Trey said, looking down. “It’s going, it’s falling, leaving us behind.”
“No,” Hope said. “We’re flying.”
“Flying…”
Lights flashed below them and to the side, accompanied by a roar as the ground tore itself apart, freeing the trapped machine. The light flared, lifting them up on a pillar of luminescence. Bursts of a more firelike exhaust streaked across the valley from the machine, enveloping hawks and Mages in writhing flame, sending them spinning away like burning stars. The hawks streamed around the valley, ricocheting from rocky outcroppings and solid machines, dripping fire across the ground and setting the blood-drenched cloaks of Monks aflame. Soon the valley was lit by fire, though the hawks and their riders seemed to shake it off, rising up again.
The battle continued. But now, dazzled by the new fire thrusting them aloft, Kosar and the others were all but blinded to its progress. They saw glimpses of the scattered fires, but the edges of the machine that lifted them up obscured any real view.
Kosar had sat down on the shaken ground. He held on to the thick grass below him, as if that would anchor him to the spot. He was terrified. Trey glanced at him and Kosar grimaced back, shrugged his shoulders. The strange, it seemed, had just become stranger.
“Where are we going?” Hope asked Rafe. She sounded so matter-of-fact, as if flying was something she did every day.
“Away,” Rafe said. He was staring at Alishia, and they both smiled. “Away. Safe. I’m so tired.” And he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
“I wish I could do that,” Kosar said.
Hope grinned at him, her tattoos catching the death moon and turning her visage ghastly. “Scared, thief?”
“Aren’t you?”
Her smile remained. “Petrified. We’re flying, for Black’s sake!”
The machine seemed to be picking up speed. They felt the bursts and pulses of energy shed from its lower edges, and with each explosion they were pushed higher. Light simmered around the machine’s lower edges. And with each gush of motion the machine itself was changing. The ribs had thickened as some dull gray coating grew around them, pulled in from nothing. The spaces between the ribs began to glow with countless points of light. Kosar had once been caught in a storm of fireflies, but this was even brighter. Soon it was bright as daylight within the gray ribs, and then lighter still, so that Kosar had to squeeze his eyes closed. It lasted for only a few heartbeats. When the light faded and he looked again, there was only the vague background illumination left from the pulse down below. And he saw what the light had made. Between each rib, for the height of a tall man, a fleshy skin stretched across. Even now veins formed on its surface and within, flooding it with blood from nowhere, and magic was at work so close, so near, that if he so desired he could have reached out and touched it.
Their sense of velocity increased. Kosar looked around at the others-Hope, wide-eyed; Trey, hanging on to the ground for dear life; Alishia and Rafe, prone, the movements of their limbs perhaps due to the motion of the machine, perhaps not-and he knew that he had to look over the edge. He had never been scared of heights or the unknown, but what terrified him most now was just what he did know. He crawled to the skinlike edging between the ribs, knelt up and looked over.
Fires had erupted across the ground. Some of them were small, others seemed to have spread and a few of them still moved. They lit up most of the small valley and the dying things it contained. It was spotted with dead Monks. He could make out the larger machines in the firelight, most of them still now, limbs slumped down, one of them accepting punishment from a group of Monks without defending itself. Their purpose fulfilled, these machines were dead again.
There was no sign of the hawks.
The machine gushed another blast of light, blinding Kosar and sending him reeling back. The roar was immense and accompanied by another burst of speed, thrusting them up and up until, suddenly, the sun found them again. The heat felt good on his skin. To the west the horizon was a smudge of yellow. If they rose forever, perhaps the sun would never set.
No hawks, he thought. Of course not. They’d have no reason to continue the battle once we were away with Rafe.
“What do you see?” Hope asked.
Kosar looked over the side again. It was strange looking down into night from a position of daylight. He wondered how high they had come.
“Kosar?” Trey prompted.
“I think the fighting’s stopped,” he said. “The machines aren’t moving anymore. I can’t see the hawks.”
“They’re stalking us,” Hope said. “They have to be. It’s the boy they want. They’ll go back for the Monks later.”
“It’s Rafe they want,” Alishia said, “and they’ll get him.”
“Go back to sleep!” Hope said.
“Then where are they?” Trey asked. “Why don’t they just attack if they want him?”
“I don’t know,” Hope said.
“You pretend to.”
“But I don’t! I don’t know anything. It’s guesswork, all of it. The only one who knows is him and… and maybe her!” She pointed an accusatory finger at Rafe and Alishia. “And they’re not telling the likes of us.”
“So what happens now?” Kosar asked. “Do we just sit and let this thing take us wherever it likes?”
“What choice do we have?” Hope said. “We’ve never had a choice. We’ve been dragged along for days, never given any option, no free will. Everything that happens to us is fated. Maybe in an hour we’ll all be dead, or free, or somewhere we can’t possibly imagine.”
“That’s helpful,” Kosar said, but her words chilled him because they echoed what he had been thinking all along. No free will.
The witch stared at him, her tattoos writhing as she grimaced in annoyance. “It’s the only help I can give.”
“So we sit back,” Kosar said. “Enjoy the view.” He glanced down over the side again at the wide forests surrounding the burning valley. A’Meer was in there somewhere, dead, already graying into the land. He scanned the darkened treetops, wondered if he was looking right at her.
The machine rose higher and higher, light bursting occasionally from its underside. The air became cold, the sky above them darker, and soon night enveloped them once again. They could not outrace the sun, however powerful the magic that carried them.
They watched and listened for the hawks. They must still be there, Kosar thought. There’s no way that single attack from the machine could have finished the Mages, no way. Not after three centuries awaiting their chance to return. There must be more to them than that. “We should plan,” Kosar said quietly. “They’ll be coming. We should figure out how to fight them off.”
“Don’t be so stupid,” Hope said.
“And don’t be so fucking negative!” Kosar stood on the uneven clump of ground held inside a machine, glowering at the witch where she squatted next to the unconscious boy. “Why did you come along, why did you take it on yourself to protect him? When we first met he was yours and yours alone! Now you’re ready to sit back and let the Mages take him without a fight? I don’t believe that.”
“No, I’m not ready to do that at all,” Hope said. “I just admit that we don’t have a chance. It’s hopeless. How can we fight them? You have a sword, Trey has a disc-sword, I have a few false charms in my pockets that would barely hurt a street urchin, let alone one of them !”
“What do you know about them?”
“Enough to know we don’t stand a chance.”
“You know nothing,” Kosar said softly. “You know nothing because no one knows anything. They’ve been gone for so long that every story about them has been twisted and turned. They could just as easily be sad, pathetic, weak old things that will drop dead at the flick of a knife.”