He paused and looked around. No fledge mines in The Heights, he thought. He snorted to clear his nose and breathed in again, but this time the scent was absent. Yet there was something in the night, a consciousness colliding with his own but trying not to make itself known. He looked left and right, searching for a sign, a shifting shadow or the glitter of unknown eyes watching from the vague distance. Nothing…and yet for the first time in days, he no longer felt alone.
He stood and spoke into the darkness. “If there’s meaning here, let me know it now. If this is just something looking for dinner, I’m old and tough, and I won’t go down without my sword opening you from arse to mouth.” Nothing responded, nor came at him from the shadows. He breathed in and sensed no fledge, and cursed his aged nose.
It was there, he thought. Just for an instant, but it was there. Because there were no fledge mines in The Heights did not mean that there was no fledge. It could be buried in deep veins never before found. Or perhaps fledgersdid know of its existence but for some reason had decided not to mine here. It was possible that a whiff of the buried drug would make it topside on occasion, especially in times as strange as these. I’m fooling myself, he thought. I’m making up stories where there are none, and making excuses for things I can never know.
Jossua walked on, glancing behind now and then, certain that there was now something else alive in The Heights other than him and those monstrous trees. The ground was breathing again, processes were no longer ended. But not all that lives is good.
Monster…god…demon!
“I think I know you already,” he said. And even Jossua’s bad old flesh felt a thrill at such presumption.
SOMETHING HAD BROUGHT those wounded Red Monks to The Heights. They had fought a battle in the Gray Woods-a fight that had involved the Mages and stabbing, clubbing things that could only have been machines resurrected from their deaths. They could not have come this far on their own, not bearing such terrible injuries. And something had given them fresh wounds bringing them here.
“A sign for me,” Jossua said to the dark.
An hour later he saw another Monk, his body wrecked with terrible wounds both old and new. He put him out of his misery without asking any questions.
I’m following a trail, Jossua thought, and the message will lie at its end.
IT TOOK ANOTHER day to leave The Heights and find the end of the trail. Jossua guessed at the passage of time, estimating it from the periods between food and toilet rather than anything to do with the sky. Time was paused for Noreela, and it was only inside that Jossua felt it moving on. I’m too old for this, he kept thinking. The idea seemed to provide the impetus to go farther.
He saw three more Monks, two of them dead. The living one was sitting against a rock beside a dry riverbed, holding his sword in both hands and staring ahead as if challenging the death stalking him. His wounds were many, but most of them were old. He had lost a lot of blood but retained his red rage, hood still raised, robe pinned to his body by several snapped blades.
As Jossua approached, the Monk’s attitude remained unaltered. The sword was still, his eyes open and dry. He was mad.
“I am the Elder Monk,” Jossua said, but the Red Monk did not seem to hear. Jossua reached out and passed his hand before the seated man’s unblinking eyes. Yet he was still alive, because Jossua could hear his ragged breathing, feel the heat flaring from him as though the red rage were fire.
Jossua clasped one of the broken blades and jerked it from the man’s flesh. He shook once, but did not utter a sound.
The Elder looked at the blade. Short, curved, snapped at the base, it looked more like a tooth than a man-made weapon. I’ve never seen a blade like this before except…
“Except on a machine.”
The man still did not blink.
“You’re dying,” Jossua said. Silence. He looked at the various wounds across the Monk’s body. The man was sitting in a darkened circle of soil where blood had leaked and dried. The robe hid much, but Jossua had no reason to reveal this Monk to the night.
“If you’re in no pain, I’ll not kill you,” he said. “Though there’s no use for you now. Do you know that? Do you see? Were you there when the Mages came and defeated us?”
The Monk remained still and silent and Jossua left him that way, a living statue looking westward as though trying to see his way back to the Monastery.
Jossua was being watched all the way. Each breath he exhaled was taken in by something else, examined by an intelligence he could not understand. His footsteps played the beat of an alien heart, and there was always something beyond the next outcropping of rock, hidden in the darkness just out of sight, concealed behind the next mountain. The land no longer felt dead, but what life existed was strange and foreboding.
Jossua had felt this way before, and not so long ago. He was in the presence of something both terrible and great. Though he was the Elder Monk, and had seen much in his long life, still he knew his place. He walked with his head bowed, and not only because he did not wish to see.
The mountains shrank into hills, the valleys grew wider, and Jossua felt the things following him move closer. Standing in a wide fields of dead yellowberry bushes, he felt the vibration through his feet that signaled the end of his time alone.
“I know you,” he said, but there was no bravery in his voice.
Only fear.
THE SCENT OF fresh fledge accompanied a movement in the ground. Fifty steps away, on the hillside that showed no sign of harboring anything but rock, a wide swathe of yellowberry bushes waved, whispering in the dusk. Then they were tugged belowground, twigs and dead leaves bursting upward as though taken in and spat out by whatever was rising.
It was the loudest noise Jossua had heard in days, and he expected the land to object. But the Nax were more of the land than anything he knew. Noreela’s heart beat in tune with their own slumbering souls, and they had been here longer than he could imagine. They were ancient as the rock, old as the mountains, and he had often wondered how complicit they were in each small step Noreela took through time. He had come to the conclusion long ago that humanity meant little to the Nax, sleeping their time away in fledge seams far below the surface of the land. Here and there were ghastly stories of miners disturbing their sleep-fledge demons, they called them-but Jossua doubted they would be disturbed if they did not desire it. Perhaps they were like the moons, existing on a different timescale to humanity, passing through life so slowly that their movements could never be properly discerned, their meanings and intentions subject to myth and legend rather than understanding.
Jossua still felt dread whenever he recalled his recent meeting with the Nax. Deep below the Monastery, time had stood still. And his question to them-had they driven the Mages out three centuries before-remained unanswered.
Now they were back.
The Elder Monk sank to his knees and bowed his head. He did not wish to see. He did not want to know. There was no true darkness aboveground, and when the Nax emerged he would see them, take in their forms while he felt himself observed and touched and smelled.
They’ve been doing that for days, he thought. Steering me and guiding me to this place for a reason I cannot begin to understand.
He listened to the sounds of tearing undergrowth lessen to nothing, and then soil and rocks tumbled into the ground. Fledge fumes drifted across the mountainside and Jossua breathed in, the drug’s fresh touch providing a brief, vivid series of images:
The Monk lying dead, head parted from her body by my sword, and in her chest the bolts from a resurrected machine; another Monk, one I never saw, walking west through The Heights on stumps instead of legs, my face in his mind and the words of defeat on his tongue; theone I left sitting against a rock, propped there still with his sword held out in front of him. Heart racing. Red rage scorching his face. Hunger and thirst closing in, blood thinning, wounds seeping, rot spreading, and he would decay to nothing whilst still staring ahead at something so terrible he can never let it go.