Lenora smiled and thought back to their landing at Conbarma. But then she looked forward, and something sighed deep down in her mind. “Let’s talk of the future, not the past. There are battles to come that will make this one look like a fart in a storm. And now that you’re here, it’s time to organize. The Mages made each of my Krotes a captain, but you’re to be my lieutenant, Ducianne.”
“So what are you giving me?” the short woman said. Her voice was low, filled with anticipation.
Lenora stood and walked slowly to the bar. She smiled. She could feel Ducianne simmering behind her.
“Damn it all to Black, Lenora!”
Lenora laughed and turned around, holding another bottle of rotwine. “I’m giving you Long Marrakash,” she said.
Ducianne gasped. “The Duke?”
“The Duke, and whatever armies remain around him. Find them and destroy them. Bring me his head, Ducianne. Kill the Duke of this shitting land, and stick his head on the front of your machine.”
“My machine…”
Lenora nodded. “I think it’s your turn.”
THEY WALKED TO the pits together. Lenora left her machine squatting outside the tavern, venting hazy gas from several stumpy horns. She felt its eyes follow her as she walked to the harbor with Ducianne.
The limping Krote lieutenant went forward until she was within twenty steps of the shade. It spun and flexed in the air, existing within its own set of laws. One moment it looked like a giant heart, bare and beating to the rhythm of the land; the next it was a glass ball, its insides bottomless, outside opaque and mysterious. As Ducianne paused before it, the shade was barely there at all.
“So show me,” Ducianne said.
The shade sunk into the ground and rose again in the flesh pit. It brought with it a stew of living stuff: blood and brains, bone and skin, flesh and cartilage, rising as though forced upward by a slow explosion of gas from the stinking mass of dead-but-living flesh. The shade was a space between this stuff, filled only by shadow.
Ducianne took only one step back. Most Krotes withdrew several steps, and some had fallen to their knees, but Ducianne was brave. Lenora could see her old friend’s shoulders shaking and her bad foot tapping at the ground in a reflex motion, but the lieutenant remained facing forward.
It knows she’s my lieutenant, Lenora thought. It’s making her something special.
Stone and flesh, soil and bone, fire and water mixed and twisted and flexed together, and a dozen heartbeats later the shade shrank down and drew back, leaving the new machine as an offering to the Krote. Ducianne was staring at it, her foot still tapping the ground, when the shade joined them. She slumped, but did not go to her knees. Her hands stole to the two short swords at her belt and touched the hilts, taking comfort from the contact. She turned around and searched for Lenora. Her face visibly relaxed when she caught sight of her friend.
Lenora nodded at Ducianne’s new mount.
The machine was huge. Four thick, stumpy legs, a wide body with a dozen arms, each of them tipped with curls of sharpened bone that seemed to echo the Krote’s hairstyle. The thick flesh of its back was protected from below by a congealed slab of stone, melted and re-formed to provide a heavy shield. Its arms were bone and flesh, stone and fire. It gushed hot air from openings in its upper body. As Ducianne approached, the machine lowered itself, its stone stomach scraping against the dock, and one of its long arms came down and bent to form a step.
Ducianne climbed its arm and sat upon its back, smiling when she realized that it had been shaped precisely for her. She looked at Lenora and the smile widened.
The machine stood.
Ducianne sat there for some time, running her hands over the strange construct’s bony and stony carapace, finding glimmering metal levers and handles set into its back. Closing her eyes, she thought her first command.
The machine reared on its hind legs and then jumped, leaping a hundred steps and landing lightly on the roof of the tavern.
Lenora watched in amazement. She saw her own construct turn slightly as though watching Ducianne’s, then the lieutenant issued her second order and the machine jumped back down to the harbor. It strode quickly toward Lenora, halting a step away so that she could hear its insides grinding and clicking together, smell the heat that could have been its breath.
“I like it,” Ducianne said.
“I’m glad,” Lenora said. “And now, Lieutenant, there are some battle plans to discuss.”
AFTER THE PLANNING and talking, the excitement and anticipation, Lenora walked to the end of the mole. She passed the ship that had come in earlier that day and knew that it would never be sailing again. The shade had already stripped most of its metals, and it groaned as the sea’s swell nudged it against the harbor wall. Bracings were failing, and struts were popping out without their metal straps to hold them in place.
The fire and flesh pits were denuded. The shade had made almost two hundred machines since the ship docked.
At the end of the mole, Lenora sat down and looked out to sea. There was nothing but darkness out there, but just over the horizon more ships were coming this way, bringing with them thousands of Krotes. The idea chilled Lenora, but it made her proud as well. The thought of revenge-the Mages’ and her own-had often been the only idea that kept her going through those long, dark years on Dana’Man.
She was old. Sometimes she forgot that. She was old, and she would have been dead centuries before were it not for Angel and her strange touch. I have a touch of magic in me even now, she thought, keeping me alive, driving away the effects of these wounds, time, age. Angel made me live for her, and even when magic went away I was still alive. So it’s in me, and it always has been. She did not know how right or wrong she was, but the concept gave her comfort.
She ran her hand over her bald head, feeling ridged scar tissue of wounds that should have killed her. Her shoulder and neck were equally damaged, and sometimes when she heard the sea, these wounds ached at the memory of their creation. But not here, not now. Now she felt fit like never before.
And that voice was there more than ever. An echo here, a random word there, holding no meaning yet still making sense. There’s plenty of time, Lenora kept thinking, trying to quieten the shade of her murdered daughter. But sometimes that voice almost became frantic, and Lenora was beginning to wonder just how much time she really had.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 6
THEY HAD PARTED company with Kosar half a day before, and already Trey believed that they would not reach Kang Kang alive. The mountain peaks seemed no closer, still evident as ragged shadows on the horizon. The landscape had flattened into one vast plain, with few places to shelter from the chill breeze that seemed to constantly blow from the north. And Alishia had spent more time asleep than awake.
Trey had carried the librarian most of the way. At first the feeling of her flesh against his had pleased him: he could sense the warmth of her through their clothing, enjoying its immediacy. He carried her on his back, her head resting on one shoulder and legs slung over his arms by his side. He could feel her breasts pressing against him, though they were smaller than he had imagined, and the touch of her thighs under her rucked-up dress was both a shock and a pleasure. Sometimes he had been certain that she was awake; a twitch of her limbs, or a flick of her hair against his face. But the farther they went, the more Trey came to believe that Alishia was merely dreaming. When she did wake, she asked to be put down, hugging herself to the ground like a newborn sheebok.
Adult though she appeared, Trey found her incredibly light, as though she were being hollowed from the inside.
Worse, the fledge rage was upon him. It had been almost two topside days since he’d had his last crumb of the drug, and the effects of its withdrawal were beginning to tell. His mind wandered of its own accord, drifting to the past or into the hazy future as though determined to travel on its own, without the drug to guide it. He had sore feet and heavy hands, and his joints ground as though rock dust had been poured into them. He had seen the effects of fledge withdrawal several times underground, and it was never pleasant. In the world of the fledge miners, it had been used as a punishment. Whenever they stopped, he would search through his shoulder bag six or seven times, looking for crumbs of the drug that he may have missed. He knew that shreds that small would have turned completely stale by now, and would likely do him more harm than good, but the need was upon him. If he put the mouth of the bag around his face he could breathe in and smell fledge, and even the memory started to take him away. Never far, though. There was always the terrible here and now to draw him back.