“Is this your magic, girl?”
She turned and looked down the way they had come. Even though it was not snowing heavily, her footprints were already eradicated. Kang Kang is wiping me out, she thought. And perhaps luring me in. She looked back at the bridge and the dark ravine below. “You won’t get me like that,” she said, and gauged the leap again.
A sound roared in from behind. It was not thunder, or a landslide, nor was it some giant thing screaming in the dusk. Perhaps it was all three. Hope spun around and looked down the mountainside. The landscape was confused by the moonlight and snow, and it could have been her own panicked pulse that caused every shadow to throb with movement.
Alishia gasped again, and then uttered something that could have been a laugh.
The stepping-stone bridge hung over space. Hope tested the first stone with one foot, careful to keep her weight on solid ground. It felt firm. More grumbles behind her, whispers from below, and she pressed harder, expecting the rock to fall away at any second.
“Alishia?” Hope said. “Is this you? Is this what’s in you?” She breathed in the girl’s stale breath, tried to feel her heat, hoping that something of it would pass to her.
The witch stepped fully onto the first rock and held her breath. Nothing happened, so she moved on, eyeing the far edge of the ravine with every step, ready to leap should she detect any movement in the bridge. When she reached the other side she gasped with relief, and Alishia laughed in her sleep, and the rocks tumbled away. Their impacts reverberated from the ravine’s sides for a long time.
The mountains started grumbling again.
“Not happy, eh?” Hope shouted. There was no echo. Perhaps the snow dampened it. Or maybe once the mountains held her voice, they would never let go.
The path started again, and Hope followed.
MORE FIRE THAT did not touch her, more burning books and memories erased, more of Noreela scorched away and crushed beneath the feet of the thing chasing her. It’s one of them, she thought, one of the Mages, a part of them in here after me. It knows I’m here because the shade saw me. And if it finds me and crushes me, kills me…is that it for Noreela? I’m just a little girl…am I really all there is?
Around another corner, across an open space where old leather chairs and a scarred reading desk simmered with the promise of fires to come, and then Alishia was in between book stacks again, running her hands along spines and experiencing a flash of vision from each one because there was more she had to know. The land had told her so much, but not enough. There was more she had to know!
The thing behind her roared. It was so near that she could sense the coldness of it bearing down upon her, closing in from all around like a giant hand slowly closing around a small insect. As fast as she could run, this Mage-thing could move faster.
The floor before had given way again, leaving a wide chasm sharp with the teeth of splintered boards. More books already lay across this opening, another bridge to save her, and as she mounted it the bridge gave way and sent her down into the darkness.
Alishia screamed, flailing her arms and legs, and then struck stone. She was lying on the floor of a cave. It was illuminated by the flames of burning books-there were a few here and there, stuffed into hollows in the walls, though this was no library. This was a place below the library, and away from it.
She held her breath.
She could see the opening in the ceiling above her, the hole in the floor that the book bridge had failed to cross. Books and loose sheafs of paper were blown past the opening, driven by a sudden storm, so fast that they almost blurred into one continuous stream.
Something pressed in. She felt the air pressure change, rising as the thing came closer. Blood trickled from her ears and her eyes felt crushed. She started to shake.
It’s here, she thought, above me, right above me, right now.
The storm continued. And then began to abate.
Nothing entered the cave.
And when total darkness came and faded again, Alishia dared believe that she had been missed.
HOPE FELL, AND knew that something was coming. It was a heaviness in the air, the sound of something smacking at the atmosphere and moving on by means of violence. She knew that she should try to hide them away-they were bare and exposed, an obvious blot on the plain white landscape of the path-but she could not move. Terror held her.
She shivered and grabbed the girl to her. Alishia was still asleep.
“No,” Hope whined, hugging the girl tighter, appreciating the intimacy of human contact more than she ever had before, in all her years as a child with her loving mother, and the decades she had spent whoring in Pavisse.
The thing grew closer, and then passed overhead.
Hope had to look.
It was huge. A shadow blotting out the sky as it passed them by, passing north to south, climbing into Kang Kang a hundred steps above the ground. She saw the two shapes upon its back, one upright, the other slumped down. She knew them, because she had seen them before.
Hope’s heart stopped. Her life froze, and her mind thundered on.
Do I die now? she thought. Now that they’ve found us, will my body give in and leave the girl to their mercy?
The Mages’ machine flew on, higher, dipping neither wing to bank back at her.
Hope’s heart kicked in her chest and resumed its frantic beat.
Missed us! She could barely believe it. She cried into Alishia’s neck, shuddering, welcoming the gush of warm breath on her cheek as the girl sighed in her sleep.
HOPE PUSHED FURTHER into the mountains of Kang Kang. She knew that her madness insulated her, but there was something else as well. A distance had grown about her and Alishia. It was nothing visible, nothing she could sense, but it was as if they traveled in a bubble of normality that did its best to hold back Kang Kang’s influence. Perhaps it had even shielded them from the Mages…though Hope had already begun to wonder whether that had been a dream. She heard strange noises, smelled peculiar aromas and here and there she saw things that she could not explain, even in the confines of her madness. But their effects were kept at bay. She moved onward, Kang Kang existed around her but her ever-changing mind was still wholly her own.
“Mad and bad,” she muttered, smiling. Someone had called her that years ago, a customer who had tried to leave without paying. Hope had thrown a powder across his back which raised red welts and left him itching for days. Mad and bad, he had called her, and she liked it now as much as she had then. Mad and bad, that’s me, and you stay away, Kang Kang, or you’ll get a dose of the same.
Rocks ground together, wind drifted down from the mountaintops like bad breath and Hope walked on.
She was changing shoulders more often, even though Alishia seemed to be growing smaller at an alarming rate. She was a young girl now, maybe the size of an eight- or nine-year-old. Her body had shrunk and changed, her face filled out and her skin was pale. The witch tried to dribble water into her mouth, but Alishia spat it out. She tried to feed her dried herbs from her shoulder bag, but the girl’s mouth squeezed tight, rejecting food. Perhaps food would make her grow again. Maybe growing younger like this was a part of what magic had planned for her.
“Fuck fate,” Hope said. She shouted it again, hoping for a response from Kang Kang, but nothing came. Only the rocks grinding, and perhaps that was a language in itself. She listened for repetition in the noise, sounds that might signify meaning, but there was nothing. Could she really ever know the language of stones?
Perhaps they’ll be there, she thought. Waiting at the Womb when we find it. Perhaps that’s why they passed us by…if I even saw them at all.
As Hope reached the ridge connecting the first two major mountains of Kang Kang, standing in snow up to her calves and gasping the thin air as she tried to discern details of the landscape before her, Alishia started to speak. Hope could not understand, but she had heard the words before. She knew no meaning, but she remembered her mother and grandmother repeating them, passing them down through the ages even though their relevance had been lost along with magic.