She moved on to another shape, waving away drifting ash that burned when it touched her. She looked up at the cone of empty space above this strange clearing, and all around the towering walls of books were exploding into flames.
She traced more etchings, closed her eyes and thought, Death Shade needs an offering of pain. When she looked again the plants around her were withered and black, and skeletons of small animals shone in the firelight. Leaves rustled beneath her knees, dead and dry. The slab beneath her fingers was still bloodied, but now it was caked from sacrifice, strong blood that had sent a powerful message.
Alishia frowned, then suddenly cried as though everyone she had known was dead. But she could not move her hand away. To do so now would be like reading the history of the world and stopping three pages before the end.
I don’t have very long.
She wiped her eyes and moved on to the final shapes on the flat stone, excited and scared at what their reading would reveal. Birth Shade, Death Shade, she thought, but what does all that mean? Where’s the seed…and where’s the offering?
She traced her finger through the speckles of ash within the final shape’s smooth cuts, and when she came to the end everything changed again. The clearing around her became a moment in time, the plants alive and yet not shifting, small creatures pecking at the ground or grooming themselves with blood still in their veins, and thoughts frozen in their heads.
Her heart stopped.
Half-Life Shade needs the passion of life and the fearlessness of death.
Alishia fell back from the stone, rolled onto her back and stared up at the towering flames around the clearing. Her heart thumped again in her chest as if to remind her of life. She felt as if she had read a million books in one single sitting, but there was no great epiphany.
I’ve been reading the language of the land, she thought. Birth Shade, it tells me, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade. And though Noreela has spoken, it’s making no sense. She stood and screamed: “It’s making no sense!” And a shower of pages fluttered down around her head.
Alishia beat at the flames in her hair and on her clothes. Paper fell away, words blackening and disappearing before her eyes as though eaten by a shadow. “Shade?” she said. She wanted to save them all, but first she had to save herself. She dashed from the clearing and clawed at the slope of tumbled books, hoping that once back in the library she would be safe from the fire.
But what if this weight of new knowledge had made her more susceptible to damage? What if this place had suddenly ceased to be so welcoming? Perhaps she had been reading things never meant to be read-the language of the land wasfor the land, not mere people living upon it.
Alishia brushed a burning page from her back and rolled down the other side of the pile of books. She fell into a ball of flame, and the blue tongues stroked across her skin and seemed to salve her fresh burns.
She lay there for a while, listening to Noreela being unwritten word by word, instant by instant. What she had read in the clearing was important. But she knew that there was more yet to discover.
ALL OF HOPE’S talk of Kang Kang, the knowledge she held, the stories she had heard, the myths and legends that haunted squalid taverns and desolate rover camps, the screams of those who had been there dreaming about it still…none of it could have prepared her for being there.
She felt totally dislocated. Once she was a part of Noreela; now she was apart from it. This place was somewhere else. The feeling had been growing steadily, though to begin with she attributed it to hunger and thirst, the effort of rushing across the damaged landscape, the impact of her time belowground. It began as a feeling of growing apart from herself: her feet were a long way down, her hand holding the disc-sword impossibly far away. Each step took forever and sounded like thunder, yet still she had the sense of rushing headlong into Kang Kang.
The ghost of the dead Sleeping God was chasing her all the way. She felt it on her back, crushing her down far harder than the measly weight of this shrinking girl ever could. Alishia was fading away, a barely noticeable bulk that Hope shifted from left shoulder to right. The Sleeping God…even its breath would have melted her into the ground. Its ghost, its memory, its unrealized potential, Hope carried all of these with her.
Sometimes she thought she heard it scream.
Hope moved on, climbing the first of the Kang Kang foothills. In all her time as a whore and witch she had never managed to secure a map of this place. It was mentioned in Rosen Am Tellington’sBook of Ways -and Hope owned one of the few remaining original copies of that tome-and yet even that great mapmaker had found these mountains obscure and unreadable. Some of those who claimed to have been here spoke of mountains and valleys, lakes and towers, holes in the ground and the ruins of races immeasurably old and forgotten. Others spoke of fields of snow and glaciers with no identifying mark between one place and another. Yet therewere rumors of a map…whispers of a man who had come out of Kang Kang millennia ago with the lay of the land imprinted on his mind…
Hope believed none of it. Kang Kang was not a place to be mapped, nor even remembered. It was a place to avoid. Perhaps shades lived here, and tumblers, and mimics, and other things that no one should ever have to see. But this was not a world for people.
“No people,” she said, looking up at the long slope before her. The Sleeping God watched her back and Hope spun around, Alishia’s weight nudging her off balance and spilling her to the ground.
In the distance, two moons reflected from the stripped-stone landscape like a pair of staring eyes.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “You’re dead and gone! Failed me, failedus, and now you’re just a fossil!”
“It’s only in your mind,” Alishia said. The girl rolled away from Hope, sitting up and rubbing her shoulder where she had struck the ground.
Hope looked at her suspiciously. “We arrive in Kang Kang and you wake up?”
Alishia looked stunned. “We’re in Kang Kang already?”
“As if you didn’t know.”
“Where’s Trey?”
Hope glanced away, trying not to look at the disc-sword she had dropped but failing. Alishia followed her gaze.
“Trey?” the girl asked again.
“He left us. Fled back underground. Found a fledge mine, smelled his damn drug, and he betrayed us.”
“No,” the girl said.
“Betrayedyou!”
“No,” Alishia said again, her voice gentle but firm. She stared at Hope, and the witch did not like those eyes.
“We have to go on,” Hope said. “No time to sit and talk, things to do, a place to find, and you…look at you…you’re…”Is she really as small as I think? Hope thought. Or is this just Kang Kang trying to fool me again? She looks like a child. Or perhaps she’s far away.
“I’m learning.”
“Learning what?”
The girl looked away, up toward the mountains they had to pass through.
“You don’t trust me?” Hope said.
“No.”
Hope was not surprised. But neither, she discovered, did she really care. “It’s watching me,” she said. “The whole of Kang Kang, sitting here where it doesn’t belong, and it knows I’m coming and it knows you’re coming.”
“I know,” Alishia said.
“You know?” Hope stood over the girl, stooping to pick up the disc-sword. “What else do you know? What is it you’re learning? Is magic in you? Is it there now, ready to come back and fight? Give it to me!” She moved quickly, pressing the disc-sword beneath Alishia’s chin and resting her hand on the lever that spun the blade.
Hope, you stupid whore, what are you going to do now? Kill the girl? Take away any chance, any slight hope you may have of becoming what you’ve always dreamed of being?
“If you kill me, Noreela is dead.”
“I don’t care about Noreela,” Hope said. She thought of the petrified heart of the Sleeping God, once filled with such wonder. “Noreela no longer cares for itself, so why should I?”