And then a voice answered his visions: We are the Nax.
Jossua opened his eyes.
Shadows rose before him. He could make no sense of them and for that he was glad. Their presence was a negative on the world, voids rather than shadows, places that should not be filled but were. They were so wrong that Jossua could barely see them.
Priest, the Nax said.
“Elder Monk,” Jossua whispered.
Priest…Monk. What do you learn of the Nax?
Jossua thought back to his few brief years in Long Marrakash before the Cataclysmic War, training as a priest and learning the myths and legends of the land. “I…I can’t remember,” he said.
Priest…the Nax…what do you know?
Jossua squeezed his eyes closed against the Nax, tried to hold his breath, but the tang of fledge oozed through his skin and touched his mind again. He remembered-a rapid recall that played like the pages of a turned book. “You’re fledge demons,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “Sleep in the seams of fledge. Rarely seen, never survived. Sometimes the digging machines woke you, and the machines stopped and the miners working with them vanished. Then you go deeper. The fledge preserves you. Perhaps you are the fledge.”
The vision came to an abrupt end and Jossua opened his eyes, shocked. The shadows before him drew back, letting in moonlight. Jossua gasped. The Nax, he thought, unable to do anything but stare at the thing standing before him, poised above the ground in a place it was never meant to be. It dripped yellow dust, as though shedding the death moon’s light.
You know nothing of the Nax, the shadow said, and it uttered something that may have been a laugh.
Jossua tried to stand and move away, because he did not think his heart could survive this. There were other shadows on the hillside, other Nax prowling the dark and shedding the death moon’s light as soon as it touched them.
“What are you?” Jossua whispered.
We are waiting, the Nax said. You wait with us. In Kang Kang there is hope.
“The Womb of the Land?”
The Womb is protected.
“What can I do to help?”
Unprotect.
“How?”
Learn our language. And suddenly his audience was over, and the Nax had somewhere to take him.
Jossua felt something grab him around both legs. The touch was nothing he could identify. Solid and soft, sharp and blunt, it was as though the shadows had taken hold.
Will they keep me here forever? he thought, and then the shadows pulled.
He fell onto his back, reaching out behind just in time to prevent himself from being brained. Still, the breath was knocked from him, and he was dragged up the hillside toward where the Nax had emerged. They took no care over him at alclass="underline" his robe was ripped from his back, undergarments snagged on rocks or spiky plants, and the jarring impacts soon caused Jossua to cry out in pain.
Monk, the Nax said, voice full of derision.
The Elder Monk clamped his mouth shut and weathered the pain as he was dragged up the hillside. He looked up at the unnatural sky and thought of the Mages, and realized then that the Nax were acting because of what the Mages had done. Filled with mockery though they were, the fledge demons still had cause to guide Jossua here, to them.
They spoke of Kang Kang and the Womb of the Land.
They spoke of hope.
“You need me,” Jossua said, his voice shaking with the multiple impacts his body was enduring. The Nax did not respond. The pain became something else-an experience from another life, remote from him now-and as the moons vanished and true darkness took him, Jossua found a smile.
THEY TOOK HIM deep. To begin with, he felt the remnants of the yellowberry bushes scratching at his body, then there was only darkness and the impact of rock and stone. His skin and flesh were scored away. He found himself surrounded by fledge, the smooth, sandy drug soft after the sharpness of rock on his body. The Nax moved quickly, darting left and right, powering through the fledge and hauling him after them, taking him deeper and deeper. Jossua felt the weight of the world changing around him. The land above weighed down, the mass of rock sucking the blood from his body, draining him, stripping his bare wounds of loose flesh and filling him with fledge, more than was safe for a man one-tenth his age, and yet he smiled at the Nax, pleased that he felt no smile in return. They terrified him, but they needed him. In that he found comfort.
The Nax dragged Jossua until he faded from consciousness, carried away on fledge visions that made no sense to a dying man.
JOSSUA ELMANTOZ WAS over three hundred years old. He did not know how or why he had remained alive for so long, but he believed that it resulted from his purpose in life. It was his destiny to remain alive on Noreela to prevent the Mages’ return. To do this, magic had to be kept away from the people and places of Noreela.
He had never considered the possibility of failure. He was confident in his task and those who helped him: the Red Monks, mad and strong and so committed to the life they led that they thought of little else. If commitment had been a force of nature, the Red Monks would have been unstoppable.
I’m a monster, Jossua had once thought, but only once. That had been a long time ago when he was a hundred years old. I’m a monster. But perhaps it takes a monster to defeat one. And so he had continued to gather other monsters to him, converting them and making them even more monstrous than he, and the Red Monks had waited in their Monastery like a blood bubble ready to burst. Their craze and madness became their life force, a throbbing insistence that death was no easy answer, and slowly their flesh and bones and blood took on the same stubborn defiance against the Black. We’ll all be chanted down in the end, Jossua had once told the assembled Monks, and it will be the greatest death chant Noreela has ever heard.
And now here he was, his body broken and wallowing in fledge, his mind sent to see the truth of things, and the Monks’ final song was barely even a whimper. Its echoes had passed across the land without touching a blade of grass or turning a sand rat’s head. The Red Monks’ wraiths were loose and mad, awaiting their elusive rest knowing that their whole lives had led to failure.
CLOSE TO DEATH, perhaps Jossua found life for the first time.
His body lay broken and bleeding beneath the foothills of The Heights, Nax sitting about him like shadows. So many open wounds let in so much fledge that his mind soared, passing through a mile of rock with no effort at all, and when he burst out into the Mages’ dusk he reveled for a while, suddenly free of the decrepit vessel that had kept him chained to Noreela for so long. He was old and wise and mad, but with fledge driving his soul skyward he rediscovered that seed of youth, a naive curiosity that had somehow survived the centuries. For the first time in a hundred years he could remember the face of his fiancee as she cried him away to the Cataclysmic War. She had been so proud being betrothed to a novice pagan priest, and he had shunned her as he left. Perhaps he had been afraid, knowing that he would never return. Or maybe at that moment he had already found his purpose. The cruise down the River San had been like being born again, leaving behind the safety of normality and emerging into this new life of war, battles against the Krotes, everything that had followed. He wondered what had happened to his fiancee. She must have grown old thinking that he was dead. Perhaps she married, had children. And that thing she had placed in his hand, the cool metal of a brooch or other lucky charm…he had opened his hand without looking and let it sink into the water, drowning his past.
Spinning high over The Heights, Jossua tried to imagine where that charm was now. It would be buried in silt after so long, unseen from above, unknown from below. Waiting there for someone to find it again. Perhaps it would take ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, and when it was eventually discovered there would be stories built around it, tales that could never be true because there were a billion different stories in Noreela, and he did not even know the truth about himself.