But seeing the results of defeat was harder than he could have imagined.
HALF A DAY later he saw another Red Monk. This one was still crawling.
Jossua paused for a moment, unnerved by this, the only living thing he had seen in over a day. Perhaps deep inside he had decided that he would never see a living Monk again. Days spent making his way across Lake Denyah and through The Heights had engendered a sense of isolation, which finding the Monks’ corpses had only exaggerated. Now something else was moving in this valley floor apart from him.
He knelt, tilting his sword so that it did not drag against rocks. The injured Monk was a hundred steps away, crawling so slowly that movement was barely visible. Jossua had spent long nights watching the moons vie for space in the sky, and he had often tried to discern their movements, wondering what it could mean that he only made it out if he closed his eyes for hours at a time. He had once believed that it displayed his disassociation from nature, an inability to perceive the tides of time which meant that he was remote from the land’s true beat. Events of great consequence shifted with the speed of a waning moon, and Jossua missed it all because he did not have the ability to see.
He looked at the ground by his feet, trying to decide whether the shapes and shadows of moonlight in the loose shale meant anything other than twilight. He shifted one stone with his foot and nothing crawled from beneath its shielding mass. He moved another and it hid only damp darkness. The shadows were motionless.
When he looked up again, the Monk had moved a step or two, one hand reaching out as if to grab water from the stream still a dozen steps away.
“You’re still alive,” Jossua whispered, not knowing what this could mean.
He approached the Red Monk. It was another woman, robe badly shredded and stained with blood and the muck she had been crawling through. There was little left of her face. Bubbles of blood formed where her nose had once been. Her hand clawed at the ground, found a hold, then pulled. The fingernails had been ripped out. She pushed with her feet. Her other hand was crushed and stinking of rot, and Jossua could make out fresh blade wounds where she had tried to amputate.
The bad hand would poison her blood, and she still had many questions to answer.
“Lie still,” he said. The Monk lowered her head to the ground and sighed.
Jossua raised his sword and brought it down just above the elbow of the damaged arm. He severed the limb with one strike, and the Monk twitched once and whined, the sound fading to nothing as her body grew still. He kicked the stinking arm.
Jossua knelt and turned her head. She still had one good eye, and he drew close and stared into it.
“I am the Elder Monk,” he said. “You must not die yet. I need to know what happened, and where, and when. You need to talk to me now.”
The Monk opened her mouth and hissed. Her tongue, gray and swollen, scraped at her teeth, flexing aside as she tried to speak. “Wa…wa…”
“Water,” Jossua said. He refilled his canteen from the stream, returning to the woman and letting a few drops touch her lips and enter her mouth. She barely moved, though her tongue writhed like a fat slug.
“Tell me,” he said. “Where have you come from?”
The woman took several deep breaths and pushed herself onto her side, looking up to the sky as though searching for the sun. “I saw the sun set,” she said, “and it never rose again.”
“Where was this?”
“Machines…graveyard…a place where they died, but I saw them live again.”
“And the Mages?”
The woman closed her eyes. “Took the boy from within a machine. Took him away. Darkness remained. That, and slaughter.”
“Where was this?”
“Gray…Woods.”
Jossua frowned and knelt back, trying to conjure a map of this part of Noreela in his mind. The Gray Woods lay to the east, a strange place bordering the Mol’Steria Desert. He had never been beneath the influence of their canopy, but he had heard the stories.
“You crawled that far?” he said. It was impossible. This woman would be dead within hours, and not all of her wounds were old and putrid. Some of them were new. He touched her chest and smelled his hand. Fresh blood, not rank.
The Monk shook her head, and her whole body started to jitter against the ground.
“What?” Jossua said. “What do you have to tell me?”
“Taken!” she suddenly screeched. “Taken and dragged andshredded!” Her good eye opened wide. It caught the death moon and shone yellow, echoing its shape and size in the sky.
“A tumbler?” Jossua asked.
The woman shook her head and snorted. Perhaps it was meant to be a laugh.
“Then, what?”
“No tumbler,” she said. “Monster. God. Demon!”
“But it let you live.”
The woman frowned and rolled onto her stomach, gnawing at drooping heathers.
“It let you live,”Jossua said. “Why?”
“Elder, we’ve lost,” she said.
“Do you have a message for me?”
“We’ve lost, we’ve lost…” She twisted her head, small stones crunching between her teeth.
Jossua stood. “That is no message at all.” He swung his sword and cut off the dying Monk’s head. For a second her jaw still worked, and he wondered at her final thought.
He left the body to cool and walked on. Monster…god…demon! He looked up at the hillsides and along the valley, but then went back to staring at the ground a few paces ahead. If something came at him from the dark, perhaps it was best he did not know until it arrived.
Then perhaps it would give him its message in person.
JOSSUA HAD THE stolen page from the Book of Ways in his pocket, ready to be referred to once he reached Kang Kang. Though even reaching that place was not a certainty.
He passed through the heart of The Heights and found more abandoned settlements. He discovered other things too, which he knew were signs of the land’s continuing decline. In one valley, a small forest had sprung up alongside the river. The trees’ leaves still shone bright and healthy in the moonlight, though they had not seen the sun for several days. As he drew closer, Jossua realized why. He had believed they would offer shelter for a camp, and perhaps food for his supper. But he wanted none of this fruit.
Wrapped in each trunk was the body of a small child. It was as if the children had been held there while the trees grew around them, and now they were part of the trees, their arms and legs jutting from the bark in imitation of the great limbs sprouting high above their heads. The trees pumped blood and the children seeped sap. They must have been old, though their flesh was still pink and ripe, and their eyes glittered in the moonlight, following Jossua’s progress as he paused and slumped slowly to the ground. Their mouths hung open, though no sound escaped their petrified throats. He could see the whites of their eyes like the inside of a burst wellburr seed. But these were like no trees he had ever seen before.
Jossua was tired, his old bones ached, his shoulder hurt from wounds received long before any of these children were born…and yet they disturbed him. There was something powerful about their stares, as though they knew much more than he, and he had to walk around the small forest and leave the valley before he could sit and rest in peace.
Monster…god…demon!
“Where are you?” he said to the night. “Come out of the shadows. If you’re demons, I’m just like you. If you’re gods, I won’t believe until you show me. If you’re monsters…well, I’ve taken meals with worse than you. You can’t bother me.” He thought of the mad Monk’s fear as she had spoken, and those fresh wounds cut through others gained days before in the Gray Woods. “You can’t bother me,” he said again, but repetition added no strength to the words.
Walking on, Jossua looked up into the strange twilight. No stars, no clouds, only moonlight smearing the heavens and battling for supremacy. The life moon seemed to be rising still, the death moon lower in the north, yet the color that persisted was the pale yellow of old fledge.
And at the thought of that buried drug, Jossua’s next breath brought a hint of its spice to his nose.