“I’m here,” Alishia whispered.
The witch was panting, whining, looking around her more than at Alishia. Her hair seemed to be falling out in clumps, and her tattoos were twisted together into two violent ropes, buried into the corners of her mouth and continuing down inside. Hope looked as though she was dying, but she was as strong as ever before.
“Something’s coming!” the witch said, bending and grasping Alishia’s loose dress collar. “They passed us once before…if I didn’t dream it. And now they’re looking again!”
Alishia touched Hope’s wrist, encouraging her to let go. The witch started, held her breath, stood and stepped back.
“Everything’s looking for us,” Alishia said. “Please help me.”
“Where do you go?” Hope asked, grabbing Alishia’s hands and hauling her upright.
Alishia swayed on her feet, clenching her bare toes in the snow. Balance was not an easy thing to find. “Away,” she said. “To the beating heart of the land. But I don’t think I can be a visitor there again. Next time, if there is a next time, I think I may be trapped there for good.”
“You’re talking in riddles!” Hope seemed ready to strike out again, but Alishia glanced at her and the witch shuffled away from her. What does she see in my eyes? Alishia wondered.
“Lifeis a riddle,” Alishia said. She looked around at the snow-covered hillside, mountains rising before them, the sharp rocks that seemed to recede ahead of them to form a path through chaos. She smiled at Hope, not upset when the witch did not smile back. “We need to go.”
Hope’s face crumpled. She sank to her knees, shoulders shuddering with dry tears, hands clawing at her thighs through her rough dress. No sound left her mouth, but wind whistled between nearby rocks, giving voice to her wretchedness. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know where we’re going, or how to get there. I just don’t know…”
“I know,” Alishia said. She stepped past Hope and walked uphill a dozen steps. To her left a field of razor-sharp rocks scraped at the air, accompanied by an almost subaudible groan that crawled into Alishia’s feet and set her flesh crawling. To her right, shadows danced where they should not, turning the falling snow black. Ahead of them, the way looked safe.
“So nowyou’re leadingme?” Hope said.
Alishia frowned as the ambiguity of Hope’s purpose flashed across her mind. But she turned to the witch and nodded. “I still need your help, Hope,” she said. Birth Shade, Death Shade, Half-Life Shade, which can she be? she thought. The witch stood and came to her, loyal yet deceitful, determined but driven by her own madness and need to be the magician she had always wanted to be.
Alishia walked on, troubled and overwhelmed by her new knowledge. She hoped that when the time came for revelation-for sacrifice-whatever she carried inside would offer a guiding hand.
TREY FELT A change in the Nax carrying him south. They had passed through fledge seams and caverns, plunged into underground rivers and melted through a lake of ancient ice, emerging unscathed on the other side. All the while the Nax had been there at the edges of his mind, awful and playful, taunting and superior. And then they became silent and serious, and he realized that they were carrying him toward something even more inconceivable.
Where are we going? he thought, hoping that they would answer. Can I take myself? Will you let me go when we arrive? He knew that they heard his thoughts-they were in his mind, cool and sharp-but there was no response. They had not spoken to him for what could have been hours, or years.
The fledge around him changed. It was a graded change, but he felt it straightaway. He had become used to being flooded with the drug, abrading his skin on the outside and soothing his muscles and mind inside. But this new fledge was sharp and cruel, pricking at his skin like a thousand sword points and forcing into his mouth as the Nax dragged him through, filling his stomach. He coughed through the drug and could not breathe, but he had not been breathing for some time now. How could he? He was buried underground.
What is this? he thought. Images started to play across his mind. They were too rapid to catch. These visions were not his own, and he could not understand their source: he was not casting his mind because the Nax would not let him. No single image stood out, because of their speed-it was as if they played on the insides of his eyelids as he blinked-but they presented a picture of things unknown, and terrible.
Kang Kang, a voice said, and the Nax had spoken to him again.
Kang Kang! Perhaps Hope and Alishia are here even now? Maybe they’re waiting for me…though what can I do for them?
Trey did not dwell on what he might have become. The Nax dragged him through the fledge foundations of the world, and he did not breathe, yet he could think and reason like the old Trey. I am Trey, he thought. I can’t be anything else.
The fledge in Kang Kang was different. It flooded into and through him and gave him those countless images from the minds of others. The Nax disliked it, but he did not understand how he could perceive their discomfort. They were not talking in his mind, nor were their nebulous bodies actually touching his. Perhaps their uneasiness was his also.
What have I become? Trey thought once again, and they moved him on.
Sometime later, feeling the weight of the world above him lessening and the kiss of cold air against his fledge-scoured skin, Trey heard the voice of the Nax in his mind one last time.
You are there.
IN THE DISTANCE, Kosar heard the sounds of war. Fires lit the horizon, explosion of blue light boosting the glare, and a steady rumble of destruction rolled across the landscape. It reached the foothills where he waited with the Shantasi army and echoed into Kang Kang.
“They can’t last for very long,” Lucien Malini said.
“They’ll fight hard.” Kosar did not like the Red Monk at his side; did not like him speaking words so plain; did not feel comfortable knowing that their causes had converged. But the Monk seemed to have become attached, staying at Kosar’s side to protect or be protected. Kosar was hardly surprised; he had seen the way the Shantasi looked at Lucien. They’re right to hate him, he thought. And I have a right to hate him also. He glanced sideways at the Monk, surprised that he felt nothing.
The two thousand Shantasi had reached the foothills of Kang Kang just as the first sounds of battle came in from the north. Their desert creatures were all but exhausted by then, many of them dying from the huge doses of Pace beetles they had been given. The Shantasi continued on foot. Kosar and Lucien’s creature had survived, coaxed on by whispers from the Monk and Kosar’s force of will. I can’t run, he had thought, I can’t walk. I can barely crawl.
They had spread themselves out across the foothills, moving east and west to take up positions. There was no telling exactly where the Krotes would attack. But their advancing army would be seen by the Shantasi scouts hiding on the plains, and they would be warned, and by the time the Krotes reached Kang Kang, the Shantasi would be regrouped and waiting for them.
“What do we have that can fight that?” Kosar asked. A mushroom of flame and smoke rose above the horizon, spreading slowly and pushing the darkness back toward the moons. It glimmered with blue light at its furthest extreme, like controlled lightning. At this distance it was smaller than the fingernail on his thumb, but it must have been huge to be visible from so far away.
“Very little,” Lucien said. “Nothing. But the aim never was to win.”
“No,” Kosar said. “No victory today.” He thought of O’Gan Pentle and the two thousand other Shantasi they had left behind, fighting and dying in those flames. Every flash of light he saw brought death, and he wondered which rumbling explosion heralded O’Gan’s passing. He liked the Shantasi Mystic, and mourned the fact that it was war that had brought them together. “War,” he said, as though amazed that the word could be spoken. The Red Monk did not answer.