Dusk (34 page)

As if San had been the true target of its upheaval, the wave seemed to spread out and diminish after it passed by. It left little behind. Vague outlines of some of the larger buildings remained, shorn of their roofs and walls collapsed outward. The landscape, the village, the route of the river itself had taken on a uniform gray-brown color, silt coughed up from the bed now smothering everything. The water defied its previous confinement, settling into new shapes: lakes and ponds that bubbled and foamed from their unnatural and forceful births.

It took a few minutes for the waters to calm down.

Kosar and the others were silent but for Rafe’s quiet crying. He shed no actual tears, Kosar saw, as if not wishing to add to the flood. There was little to say so they simply watched. A large rainbow hung over the scene of devastation, its colors too pure to be welcome. The air was filled with swathes of mist, and the watchers soon found its cool touch coalescing on their skin, bringing with it the smell and taste of the disaster.

Eventually the noise subsided, the mists parted and the river ran upstream.

RAFE CRIED ON
the outside, and inside the magic still discovering itself howled. Like a sentient thing it mourned the death of its old existence, and though now resurrected it still felt the pain and betrayal at being misused by the Mages so many years ago. It mourned also the ongoing destruction their misuse had eventually caused. Rafe could not shut out the thoughts because he was not party to them; he was an observer—sympathetic, concerned and unequivocally entwined—but still separate from the power raging within. His fingertips prickled with its potential, his toes and other extremities warm and tingling with the force coursing through him. And in its blind rage and raging sorrow, he was not sure what he could see. Anger and hatred, hope and yearning, sorrow and vengefulness, he was not certain where the crying took root, nor what drove that fearsome energy he knew was building somewhere deep inside of him.

Rafe cried from the pain, the sorrow and the fear. But his tears were also for himself because he felt so hopeless.

He had no idea what would happen next.

“WELL, NOW IT’S
more than a river to cross,” A’Meer said quietly.

“We can ride up into the foothills,” Kosar said. He turned to look at Rafe, thinking that perhaps the boy could help them. But Rafe barely looked as though he could help himself. “Cross the river at its source.”

“Yes,” A’Meer said. She was still staring down into the shallow valley, stunned.

“Not its source any longer,” Trey said. “What do you think we’ll find if we go up into the Widow’s Peaks?” He stared at them, his thin face sad.

Kosar barked a bitter laugh. “We’re stupid,” he said to A’Meer. He pointed at the river, uprooted trees floating slowly from right to left. “Upriver. We’ll find only floods when we get there. How can a river flow the wrong way? For how long?”

“The water will gather in the hills and mountains, and within days or hours it’ll come back this way again,” Trey said. “Maybe within minutes.”

“More than just a river then,” Hope said. “It’ll be a lake rushing down this way. A
sea.
”

“It’ll make this look like a splash in a pond.” Trey waved his hand to encompass the scene before them, and Kosar knew that he was right. Whatever unnatural cause, however wrong this was, the river could only flow uphill for so long before its tremendous energy would be unleashed once again. And then it would return the way it had come, faster, a million times more deadly.

“But why . . . ?” Trey said, glancing down at Rafe as if expecting an answer.

“This is happening all over,” Hope said. “It’s the land wearing down and turning bad. Swallow holes, frozen air, flaming skies . . . and rivers running upstream. We’re just here at the wrong time. Bad luck. There’s plenty of bad luck in Noreela.”

“But the magic is back, in him. Isn’t it? Isn’t that why we’re all risking so much to protect him?”

“You’re giving magic a character,” Hope said. “It’s so much more alive than us, so much more
meant to be,
but that doesn’t mean it has thought. And why should it? Thinking like us, with our greed and avarice and disregard . . . that’s what made the Mages what they are. That’s why they did what they did, and magic tore itself from us after the Cataclysmic War. The effects of that are still being felt—we’ve just seen that—and we can only hope that if it
does
choose to return through Rafe, then it will make everything better again.”

“Or much, much worse,” Kosar said. The force he had just witnessed was nothing compared to what true magic could accomplish. The stories he had heard, the legends of machines spanning valleys, flying through the air, churning the ground . . .

“The Red Monks!” A’Meer said suddenly. “They may still be on the river, and now its flow is with them. We have to move! Now!”

Confused, shocked, they gathered their gear together, mounted the horses and started off down the hillside. Hope walked beside Rafe once more, and Trey guided the unconscious Alishia on her mount. As they reached the flatlands and the fringes of destruction, Hope ran from horse to horse, giving the riders a torn shred of the rabbit A’Meer had killed before the river’s upheaval. She had used some powder or potion to heat away its rawness, and although still cold, it tasted cooked and spiced.

Kosar chewed on the leg Hope had given him, not really enjoying the taste. There was too much on his mind, and since the idea had suggested itself to him a few minutes before . . .
perhaps the Monks are right
. . . he had been more confused than ever. Here they were racing across Noreela to deliver Rafe to New Shanti, this boy who seemed to have magic awakening within him, using him as a conduit into this world, testing the waters before revealing itself fully. And at the same time it was highly probable that were they still alive, the Mages would have heard about Rafe and perhaps seen what happened when he cured A’Meer. Alishia was evidence of that, the girl whose mind had been torn apart by some psychic invader before the thing fled back whence it had come. The Mages would covet him and this new magic. And if they caught him, snatched him from their grasp or waged war on Noreela to steal him away, magic may well be back in their hands.

And then?

Burning air or rivers running upstream would be the least terrible things. Last time, the Mages had practiced out of greed and lust for power. This time, were they to harness the magic, theirs would be a triumphant return from exile. If their armies were dead and gone to dust, they would make new ones. If their soldiers could not run fast enough, they would build machines. This time, revenge would be their prime motive.

. . . perhaps the Monks are right . . .

AT THE DIVIDING
line between normality—long grasses wavering in the slight breeze, the ground dry and hard beneath them—and the watery transgression of the river’s unnatural flood, the horses and travelers paused. Kosar and A’Meer’s mounts stamped the ground and snorted, while the weaker horses carrying Rafe and Alishia merely stood with their heads bowed, foaming pinkly at the mouth.

Alishia mumbled something and twitched in the saddle.

Rafe frowned at the ground.

A’Meer headed off first. Her horse splashed its hooves through the first puddle of water, and sidestepped the corpse of a sheebok that had been burst open by some huge impact. Split timber planks were embedded in the mud. In raised areas the grass had been washed flat, most of its subsoil having been washed away, its blades doomed to dry and die in the sun. Other bodies lay scattered around: several chickens’ feathers ruffled and coated with mud; a furbat, leathery wings spread as if trying to fly; a girl, braided hair twisted like ropes about her neck. Her eyes stared skyward, filled with its blue reflection, and there were no marks upon her body, no bloody patches on her white dress.

They tried to keep to the high ground. Kosar’s horse stumbled once into a deeper puddle, the dip in the ground hidden by the murky water, and he had to twist and hold on tight to prevent being thrown. His mount panicked and struggled to regain its footing, kicking, legs churning the water, and a dead thing bobbed to the surface. It was a fish as big as a man, yellow and bloated. Even the river life had not escaped a violent death.

The sun bore down on the watery destruction and soon a fine mist rose, drifting slowly on the breeze and dancing where air currents were confused. They began to sweat in the balmy atmosphere, but Rafe seemed not to notice. He was looking down at his horse’s hooves, watching the dead things they stepped over or around, hiding whatever he felt inside.

They came across a knot of bodies, seven or eight of them tangled together where they had been deposited against a huge rock. Unlike the drowned little girl, these all showed signs of the trauma they had been through. There were men and women, and a couple of corpses that were damaged beyond identification. No carrion picked at their tattered remains; no flies buzzed their opened, washed-out gray wounds. Perhaps it was because they had only just died and the things that fed on dead things had yet to discover them. Or perhaps those things did not wish to feast upon corpses created by nature’s upheaval. There would always be plenty of dead things elsewhere.

The mist did not hide the horrific sights, but it made them hazy. In a way that was worse. Truths half hidden were dwelled upon endlessly, their realities filled in with imaginations overwrought by what was around them.

Rafe barely raised his head. If he had magic to cure the ills of the land, he did not show it now.

As they neared the river, higher areas of ground became less and less frequent. The floodwaters were deeper and more expansive, and eventually the landscape changed so that there was more water than land. The horses found it easy wading through the water at first, but Hope and Trey were soon struggling, and eventually they stopped and were hauled up, Hope behind Kosar, Trey behind A’Meer. The four horses continued on their way, the water sometimes touching their bellies.

As they drew closer to what was still, they supposed, the River San, they could make out more of what was left of the village. Its riverside areas had been totally torn away; piers, jetties and fishing sheds all gone, smashed up and spread across the plains along with those unfortunate enough to have been on or in them at the time. Farther inland, there was still little recognizable as part of a village. A stone wall here, a boat there, smashed in half, come to rest against a mound of stones that may have been the remains of a home. There was little evidence floating on the water—the ruins of the village had been washed along the river and distributed inland, floating and bobbing now around their horses’ feet, wood and cloth and dead fish and dead people all that was left of San.

“We’ll be at the old riverbank soon,” Kosar said. He glanced down at where the water washed against the horses’ thighs. “It’ll be much deeper there. We’ll need a boat, a ferry, something to get us across.”

“There’s nothing left,” Hope said behind him.

“There has to be,” A’Meer said. Whether she spoke with certainty or desperation was not clear.

“How far away can those Monks be?” Kosar asked. “Trey, they were in boats. Did they have horses?”

Trey, sitting behind A’Meer, frowned and shook his head. “No horses, I don’t think,” he said. “Just lots of Monks. Small boats, but fast. They were rowing, and sailing as well.”

“So if they do reach us before we’re across, we’ll still have a chance,” Kosar said. “We can run faster than them.”

“Two of us on each of the good horses?” Hope asked. “And those back there . . . I traded them from farmers who could barely feed themselves, let alone their livestock. I’m surprised they’re not dead already. Two minutes galloping and they’ll collapse. We should swap . . . Rafe should have one of them, he’s the important one.”

“We’re
all
important,” A’Meer said.

“But he’s the one we’re trying to save,” Hope said quietly, tattoos in turmoil.

“Whatever, we can’t get much farther than this,” A’Meer said. They came to a halt on a mound with its tree-lined head protruding slightly above the water. There was room to dismount and walk to the river’s edge, look out across the wide expanse of muddied water at the opposite side, ambiguous in the mist, the true edge of the river indistinguishable from the flooded plain. The waters flowed from right to left, the results of its violent upheaval floating along with it. Trees and bushes, bodies and smashed timber-boarding and a few things still struggling to remain afloat, wings waving, legs kicking. It seemed the animals were stronger in a disaster such as this, because the only people they saw were dead.

“Shit, it’s hot,” Trey said. He had stripped to his trousers and boots, and Kosar saw the varied scars on his yellow skin, wounds from innumerable accidents belowground. He wondered what Hope looked like beneath her rough dress, whether the tattoos continued out of sight, forming their own secret designs. There was much secrecy about her, however open she claimed to be, and he feared that her shoulder bag held much they had not yet seen.

“Rafe?” Hope said. “Is there anything you can do for us?”

Rafe blinked as if she had spoken an unknown tongue.

“Rafe?”

“I’m only a farm boy,” he said. He frowned as he spoke and leaned sideways in the saddle, splaying his fingers and touching this island of grass and trees. “This is good soil.”

Hope shook her head, glanced at Kosar, looked across the river once more.

“I could swim it,” A’Meer said. “Get over to what’s left of San and see if there’s a boat there, something left undamaged.”

“And then?” Kosar said. “Will you paddle it against the flow for us? Dodge the trees that will hole the boat if they hit you?”

“What else do you suggest?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “We have to risk it with the horses, I suppose. It may be shallow enough most of the way for them to walk, and then they can swim when they have to. Horses are good swimmers. And—”