He opened his mouth to scream, but the Nax were the air.
He ran toward the tunnel once again, certain that its dark mouth was the only place where the Nax had not gathered. Heading for topside brought the pain again, lighting his way and displaying in a flash the hundreds of Nax lining his route. They reached for him as the light blinked out-limbs, wings, flaming tongues-but none of them could touch him in the dark.
He reached the mouth of the working and entered, running through the agony of his upper body.
It’s the fledge rage, he thought, torturing me more than the wounds Hope gave me, tearing me up from the inside, giving me nightmares when I’m already in one.
He ran through the mines, cringing away from the walls of Nax that each flash of pain revealed. It was as though they saw him only when the pain came, but by the time they reached for him he had willed it down again.
The light became more rhythmic, the pain more regular, the claws of the Nax closer and closer to ripping into his dreaming flesh.
He saw himself through their eyes, with their minds. He was nothing amazing at all.
TREY OPENED HIS eyes. However terrible reality might be, he welcomed it.
He was cold. The sky was stained the color of stale fledge by the death moon. The life moon seemed to be fighting a losing battle, and Trey stared at it in the hope that it would grow.
His head thumped with fledge rage. A lump of it-a grain, fresh or stale, beneficial or fatal-would take the pain away. Fledge would carry him home, back to the place he should have never left. Sonda and his mother were dead down there in the ground, two miles below and hundreds of miles away from him, but at least he would have been dead with them had he found the courage to stay.
His arm and chest were boiling hot, freezing cold. Blood still flowed freely across his body, passed between his arm and his side, tickled his armpit, seeped to the ground and dripped down onto the thing Hope had recently emerged from. Trey could feel himself open to the night. He raised his good arm and laid it across his chest, and he touched the meat of himself there, parts he should have never felt. He stank of his own blood.
Hope killed me, he thought, and his mind recoiled. No!
He remembered the look on her face as she lashed out with his disc-sword. He had killed stingers with that weapon in the caves, and it had tasted Red Monk blood at the battle in the machines’ graveyard. Now its steel was smeared with him, its handle spattered with his blood, and perhaps soon that would be the last of him.
No! he thought again. Alishia…
A terrible fear took him, a dreadful certainty. He moaned and rolled onto his right side. His left arm struck the ground, the slashed muscles denying him control. The flame of agony illuminated his night for a few seconds, but this time there were no Nax waiting for him. I dreamed them, he thought. They’re still my nightmare, even lying here like this. He lifted his head and looked around.
He was lying where he had fallen, next to the hole in the ground from which Hope had emerged ranting and mad. Alishia had been lying close to him when Hope came up, asleep or unconscious, and he searched for her now. Perhaps Hope had gone mad and killed them both. Perhaps she had found her thing in the ground wanting, and now she was raving across Noreela seeking her own demise.
But Alishia was not lying where he had left her.
Trey rolled onto his back again and looked left, biting his lip against the pain. No Alishia.
Had the witch killed the girl and tumbled her into the hole?
He rolled again, shifting himself around to try to see into the ground, but there was still no sign of Alishia.
I need to sit up.
It took Trey a long time to raise himself into a sitting position. Each breath hurt, every movement was agony, and he was starting to feel faint as blood loss darkened the dusk. But once up he could look around, and he was now certain that Hope had taken Alishia with her.
There’s no way I can give chase, he thought. He was sure that he was dying. The pain scoured his soul, seeking to pluck it from his body, and if that happened he would be just another lost wraith waiting for someone to chant him into the Black. There’s no way I can go after her. He looked south toward Kang Kang, those distant teeth set in the edge of Noreela. It had taken him an hour to sit up, and it would take him an age to go that far.
He tried. He managed to stand, swayed, biting his lip until he tasted blood, trying to chase away the faintness and find the stance that suited him best. He reached across his body with his right hand and grabbed his left sleeve. He lifted, head back so that he could look at the sky, and brought his slashed arm up until it was pressed across his body just below his chest.
He was crying. The tears carried a subtle taint of fledge and he licked them from his upper lip, knowing they would have no effect but welcoming their taste.
If I don’t die from blood loss, the fledge rage will be waiting.
He braced his left arm against his body, popped two buttons on his shirt and pushed his hand inside.
Trey gasped and almost fell. He thought perhaps he could move like this. His legs shook and his thigh muscles felt as though they were ready to cramp, but he set one foot in front of the other, one at a time, avoiding shadowed areas that might hide a pit or a hole, and he took ten steps south.
That’s how I can do it, he thought. One step at a time. Concentrate…There, one step closer to Alishia. And another…and another.
But however much he tried, however hard, Trey could not fool himself. He would be dead long before he reached Kang Kang.
TREY WALKED ACROSS the bare ground, craving grass and soil, bracken and heather beneath his feet. He was used to rock, but since coming topside he had realized that rock was merely the bone of the land. The living part of Noreela was what grew and lived upon it.
Where he was now, Noreela felt dead. The stone was cool and uncompromising beneath his feet. His blood splashed darkly across its surface, looking like holes in the moonlight. At least there’s life there, he thought. But it would not last for long.
He had no idea how far he had come. He was concentrating too much on placing one foot in front of the other to judge distance, and his only gauge of the passage of time was the need to urinate. He stood still to piss, and ignored the exhaustion that threatened to topple him. If he lay down to rest he was doubtful that he would ever rise again; the bare, dead skeleton of Noreela would suck the life from him and he would lie there forever.
He felt the weight of that unnatural cloud above him, swirling so slowly that its movement was barely noticeable. He glanced up only once, but the sight made him woozy, its weight tugging at him until he was ready to fall. It may come down, he thought. It may all come down again. But even that fear could not increase his speed.
Then something howled in the darkness. It seemed to come from a long way off at first, but after a pause another cry sounded from much closer. Trey fell to the ground and crawled into a depression in the rock, fearing that the creatures would smell his blood and tear him apart. He had no idea what animals would be wandering here. If Kosar were with him…
But Kosar had left Alishia in Trey’s care, trusting him with the girl because he knew that Trey thought highly of her.
Trey closed his eyes and thought of Alishia’s beautiful face and the dark, closed mind he had seen on one of his fledge trips. She had been so much like Rafe; so much power hidden away. It was confusing that someone so powerful needed protecting, but it had been the same with Rafe, and he had seen the way that ended.
This won’t be the same!
A creature howled so close that Trey could almost feel the warmth of its breath. Another answered from the distance, and another, and he realized why he had not been able to place where the call came from: there were many of them, not just one. The howls started deep, rising in tone until they almost disappeared from his range of hearing. He could not tell whether they were in pain or on the hunt, harmful or harmless. Whatever they were, they sounded big.