“I don’t know. Something. I had a crumb of your fledge. I hope you don’t mind, but I was curious and… I wonder if it may be because of that. Maybe I’m imagining things.”
“You had fledge?” Trey asked. Alishia found his tone disturbing, and she stepped away. Here was a stranger she had found on a mountainside, alone with her in the dark. Her knife felt even more ineffectual than ever.
“Only a little.”
“What do you sense?”
“I don’t know. Something in the shadows.”
“Nax,” Trey said, so softly that Alishia was not sure he had actually spoken at all. The horse whinnied as if in response. “It’s the Nax,” he said again. “Now that it’s night they’ve come up! Nothing left for them down there. They’ve come up to put right what woke them in the first place!” He was raving now, fear given voice, and in the deepening darkness his shout was louder than ever.
“I haven’t seen anything,” Alishia said, not entirely sure if that was true.
Perhaps the fledge miner’s fear translated to the horse. Or maybe the horse itself sensed something then, the watchful thing Alishia had known in her dreams and which she now sensed in the surrounding shadows. Whatever the cause, the result was inevitable. The horse bolted. Alishia ran after them, mindful of the uneven ground and the holes she had seen, but desperate not to lose her horse, and with it the saddlebags and all her belongings. Trey fell and rolled across the ground, and the horse ran on, galloping into the night until it was little more than a shadow itself.
Alishia shouted in frustration. And then she heard the sickening sound of breaking bones, something big hit the ground, and the horse cried out in agony.
She tripped and struck her head on a rock. She was sure, even as pain took sensation away into unconsciousness, that she had tripped over nothing but shadow.
THE SHADE REDISCOVEREDthe mind down in the real world, still possessed of dregs of the freedom that had attracted the shade so much. It hovered for a while, noticing the passing of time purely via the changing of the mind it focused upon. The mind soared and dreamed and traveled in a rich vein of knowledge, opening itself up more than any the shade had yet encountered. It had been drawn back here by that openness, and the fact that such simplicity would surely be receptive to any signs of magic, hints that things were not quite as they had been. And it was this that the shade’s god sought.
Again and again, skimming beyond the world, dipping in on occasion to gain experience and feel the slick shock of existence, the shade tried to tap into the mind. It offered itself first, giving the mind something to focus on, but it must have frightened it away instead. It had no way to lure-it was essentially nothing but future memory, so what could it possibly offer a mind of such magnitude?-and so instead it had to inveigle its way inside. It would use its pure, untempered instinct for life, the one sense that its god had perpetuated and encouraged and which nature, by judging it as an imperfect example of its sort, had sought to take away. And this life had the god at its center. The shade put ideas of its god into the mind’s way, letting it stumble and trip and absorb, drawing it up out of the real world until it began to soar again, questing knowledge. Still it veered away from the shade, afraid of its blankness, but the shade persisted, planting more ideas, steering the mind, hovering and struggling to find a crack through which it would penetrate to become corporeal at last.
That crack came unbeckoned.
The mind suddenly exploded up and out of the real world, a maelstrom of confused emotions blended with pain and surprise. The shade backed away and let the mind soar, expand, open itself out until it settled once again just beyond the boundaries of unreality. There it dreamed and reveled once again in its knowledge. But there was something ever-present-a worry, a fear, a dread-that the shade could work on.
It approached, dipped down and found itself sharing.
The mind recoiled. The shade rejoiced. It spread itself and was instantly dizzied by the sensations and emotions therein. There was pain and the taste of grass and mud, the sound of distant shouting and the sense of a heartbeat, fast and irregular, grasped in an icy fist of fear. It opened its mouth and shouted, felt the thing it had become shouting along with it, raising a voice that echoed back again and again. It could smell heather and blood, feel something sharp pressing into its face and something soft and cool next to that, tickling its mouth.
It was a person. Its name was Alishia.
The shade screamed again from sheer delight and Alishia jumped to her feet, laughing and spinning around, tripping and jarring her knees and palms on rough rock, hardly noticing the pain.
For a few seconds that she could not explain, Alishia reveled in the simple fact that she was alive. And that life was rich with potential.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 14
WHEN RAFE WOKEit was dark. Weak moonlight bled into the room from two wide vents high in the wall, giving enough light for him to recognize where he was. He tried to sit up but his head thudded, pain spearing into his eyes and down his neck. He groaned, held his temples and sat up slowly, trying to hold the pain so that it did not move around. He’d had headaches before, but nothing like this. Perhaps Hope had given him some bad rotwine without his noticing. He had seen plenty of people like this in Trengborne, suffering harsh hangovers each morning and feeding them again come afternoon and evening.
He looked around the room-the walls adorned with many shadows, the odors of the place more noticeable now that he could see less-and then he saw Hope. She was sitting in a chair by the far wall. Her hair was silhouetted against the stone by the weak moonlight, sticking up like a nest of sleek snakes, and though her face was in shadow Rafe was sure he could make out her tattoos, shifting slowly to mirror the effect of her hair. He held his breath for a moment and heard her slow, heavy breathing.
He realized suddenly that he was naked. It was cold, even though a few spluttering embers remained in the open fire, and Rafe wished that he could find his clothes without moving. His headache had come to terms with him sitting upright, but still it pounded at the backs of his eyes.
He ran his hand down over his stomach. Hope had given him a reason for his lack of a navel, and it was not a reason he liked. She had been right, he had begun to wonder, but somehow the idea of asking his parents had always seemed wrong.
Something was whispering in his ear. He turned his head quickly to look behind him, wincing at the pain but holding his breath, waiting to see, wanting not to. There were only shadows, deeper within his own. The whispering continued, words in a language he could not understand. The meaning was way beyond his grasp. The source of the whispers moved to his other ear and then inside his head, soothing the ache there, numbing the pain and planting fresh, potent ideas that he shied away from. He did not understand fully, but there was nothing hiding the power that these voices imparted. They breathed the smell of grass in rolling meadows and the tang of fresh snow on mountaintops, inspired the taste of rain on his tongue and the feel of a breeze across his skin. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The voices paused as if awaiting an answer, and when none was given-he did not know how-they faded quickly away, leaving him sitting there in the dark with no headache, warm and, for the first time in two days, unafraid.
“You’ve been dreaming as well,” a voice said from the dark. Hope was still awake. Rafe was hardly surprised. “I’ve been sitting here watching you. Trying to come to terms with things, with what I know. Trying to work out what to do next. You’ve been dreaming and talking in a language I haven’t heard spoken in my lifetime, and you sit there awake and now you’ll tell me you’re just a farm boy, you don’t know what I’m on about. I can understand your confusion. But I also sit here confident that I have a miracle sleeping in my bed. And that miracle is the future.”