Something hot.
HE WAS BATHING in fledge. He was underground-in a dream or reality, he neither knew nor cared-and around him the drug was crumbling, giving itself to his touch, finding his wounds and soothing them, pricking his tongue with its tangy freshness, setting his blood and his brain afire and readying his mind for any journey he wished to take. It was the freshest fledge he had ever encountered, as though he had found it not only before it was touched or mined, but at the actual moment of its creation. There had been much speculation as to what fledge was and how it came into being: it was grown by the Nax, itwas the Nax, it was the fallout from Nax dreams. But the simple truth of the drug had often done away with such musings. It was like questioning the existence of air or the origins of water, questions both pointless and faithless. What mattered was that they were there.
Trey welcomed in another mouthful, chewing the perfect grittiness into a paste, swilling it between his teeth and below his tongue and letting it slip down his throat. It set his flesh alight and took away much of the pain. Something else touched his mouth, briefly but definitely. He opened his eyes but there was nothing to see, so he closed his eyes again and welcomed some more of the crumbling fledge inside.
He was moving, slipping through a seam of the drug as though he were a fledge demon, steered between rough stone walls and protruding rocks. The drug parted around him easier than it ever should have, coming apart before him and joining again behind. And it whispered all the time, giving him ideas and images that he would never have imagined himself.
The fledge rage retreated, defeated and petulant. He was happy to feel it go.
I can travel, he thought, and he set his mind free of his body, moving away and only glancing back once.
He obscured what he saw from his mind. The drug made it easy to do so.
Trey traveled, up out of the ground and into the cool dusky night. He spun and rose in the air, trying to decide which way to go. North would only take him back over the ground he had just traversed, and he had no wish to see that ruined landscape again. South…that would take him closer to Kang Kang, and while that was not a place he wanted to go, he had need to travel there. He must find Hope and Alishia, and make sure that the girl was still alive.
He moved through the air, a mind separate from body yet still inextricably linked. The ground below soon returned to normal, and he passed through the huge banking of uprooted trees, soil, rocks and dead creatures that marked the limit of this strange effect. He sensed little still alive in that pile of detritus: a sheebok here, a snake there, shaken and confused by what had happened and still trapped. They would be dead soon. He emerged from the other side of the mound into open air once more, expecting to find a normal landscape below him: trees and scrub, rocks and gulleys. Streams, perhaps, originating in the foothills of Kang Kang and venting out onto the plains. Even dwellings.
But what he found was anything but normal.
This was the edge of Kang Kang; its first small hills, its border region, pushing against the rest of Noreela like opposing poles on two swing-sticks. Trey paused high in the air, disoriented and confused for the few seconds it took him to level out and calm down.
The ground below looked like the diseased skin of a buried giant. Here and there soil had filled a hollow and given rise to small shrubs, grasses and trees, but most of what he could see was a pale, pitted surface, marred by conical vents gushing steam. The steam flowed southward toward Kang Kang, dispersing into a mist. The light from both moons reflected through the mist, casting shifting shadows on the ground below.
Trey dipped lower, moving into the steam to hover close to one of the vents.
He recoiled as a slew of images struck him, each with a distinct emotional impact. He wanted to cry and laugh, cower with fear and march on unafraid, but the visions were confused, their implications sensed rather than seen or felt. The instant he thought he had an understanding of one image, it flitted away to be replaced by another.
The ground was venting memories that Trey could not understand. He was glad. They tasted of painful histories, and right now it was the future that concerned him most.
The vent resembled a pustule on bad skin, except a thousand times larger, standing as tall as a man and its surface so stretched and tight that it was almost translucent. He wondered whether he would find any memories of the future inside, so he moved back down. But the vent would allow him no access. He moved around it and tried again, probing with his disembodied consciousness, feeling strong from the fledge but still unable to see inside this thing pouring memories from the land.
The flow from the vent’s mouth was fast, tempting and hypnotic, and Trey had to force himself away. If he submitted to its allure, perhaps he would be lost in Kang Kang’s memories until he became one of them.
And then, struggling away from the flue, he saw movement farther up the hillside.
Hope was dragging Alishia after her across the strange ground. The girl was struggling behind the witch, trying hard to keep up. Hope had a tight hold on Alishia’s hand.
Trey closed in quickly, pausing above the witch and listening to her insane babble.
“All gone, all lost, come with me, come on, girl, keep up! We’re nearly there, we’ll find the place and the place will find us, and I’ll be there when you’re there. Forget the past, forget what happened here, don’tbreathe if that’s what it takes, it’s misdirection. Kang Kang fooling us into thinking it’s stillalive… Keep up, girl!” She tugged at Alishia’s hand and the librarian began to cry.
Alishia was smaller than ever, her clothes hanging on her as though she were barely there at all. Her eyes were watery, dark rings beneath them, and the skin of her face looked sallow and sweaty.
What’s happening to her? Trey thought. But he knew without asking, and without going closer, and without dipping into her mind to try to tell her everything was going to be all right.
She’s dying.
Trey moved closer to Alishia and passed inside her, looking for that vibrant young woman he had known for such a short, precious time. But he found something else instead, a place that drove him away like steam from one of the land’s vents: a burning library, books falling, blackened paper floating on the air, words and history of Noreela becoming ash and dust beneath his gaze.
“What’s that?” the witch squealed, thrashing around her head with Trey’s disc-sword.
Trey tumbled from Alishia and rose high into the air, looking only upward because he did not wish to know what down revealed. The dusk persisted, always dusk, and he stopped only when he became afraid that he would never find the ground again.
Trey returned eventually to his own body, finding it deep beneath the ground. And slipping back inside, he realized where he was, and began to wonder why.
THE NAX MADE hollows in the wide fledge seam and moved Trey ever southward.
The miner was more petrified than he had ever been before. His heart fluttered like a bird trapped within the cage of his chest. The fledge flooded his system and tried to calm him, but he could sense what was moving him. He could feel their shapes and forms, and they were wrong. He could hear their voices, words he could never know, and they were wrong. He could sense their minds around him, inviting him to enter, urging him to view things through their own world, and every touch of their thoughts was very, very wrong. Trey opened his mouth to scream but there was no air to draw into his lungs, only fledge. He inhaled anyway.
Soon, he was drowning.
Tim Lebbon
Dawn
Chapter 12
ALISHIA HEARD THE voice of Hope the witch, mad and raving and filled with selfish intent, and everything around them was wrong. She closed her eyes and found sleep again, a place haunted by the stink of burning.