Dawn by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page A

the scrape of metal on stone. Lucien paused. He could see no movement, but the sound was shifting slowly from right to left. He tried to silence his breathing but could not; his injuries were too varied, their effects too harsh.
    He could smell death here, but he could sense fear as well. It was manifest in the silence, the stillness, the way that no door opened even a crack as he approached the village from the west. In the light of the death moon the villagers would see him walking along the rutted road. They would see his sword, his torn cloak and the wounds that still seeped blood. Some of them might even know of the Red Monks, and the cause that drove their madness. Yet today…
    “Failure tastes bitter,” Lucien muttered. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the road and ground it down into the dust. The scrape of his boot was loud in the eerie silence hugging this village.
    Not even the sound of an animal, a bird, a plant shifting in the breeze coming in across the desert.
    “I don’t fear you!” Lucien shouted, blood bubbling heavy and thick in his chest. He spat again, up at the sky this time, and welcomed the blood pattering down on his face. It gave him back his color.
    The sound of metal on stone came again, from two directions this time, and below it he could hear something dragging across the ground, like an echo of his foot grinding blood into the dust.
    “We can lose, but you can never win,” he whispered. And he still believed that. Through everything that had happened over the past few days, he still believed in his cause. He had to. If he lost faith now, his body would give in. His faith gave him power.
    The first shape emerged from behind one of the low houses, crawling slowly into view. He could not tell whether it was a man or woman. In one hand it seemed to be holding a sword, and its legs were clad in metal. Each time it moved, it moaned.
    Another shape crawled toward him out of the darkness. This one held two swords and wore a metallic mask, shiny in places and smeared with blood in others.
    The Red Monk stood his ground and hefted his own weapon, but he sensed no fight in these things. They were not coming for him. They were simply moving, because to stay still was to submit to the pain of transformation. As the first shape came closer, Lucien saw that they were not holding swords at all.
    Their hands had turned to metal. Legs too, and faces, flesh blurring to silver. And this close he could hear their moans more clearly, tell that somewhere behind that human sound of pain was an inhuman clicking and rattling as things inside milled together.
    Lucien could see human eyes moving behind the metal facade of the second shape’s face. They held nothing sane.
    He stepped back, avoiding these crawling monsters. They must have started changing before the Mages’ victory, yet still he blamed the magic. It was the cause of everything wrong in the land, and these travesties were more examples of a bad world growing worse.
    Lucien dodged past the half-human things and ran through the village. Here and there he saw a glimmer of metal beside the low dwellings, but he did not pause. As he passed the outskirts he saw the remains of a huge old machine half buried in the ground, and the death moon reflected from fresh breaks in the various metallic limbs. Perhaps it had spread like a disease.
    He ran, ignoring the screams of his wounds, and for a long time after he checked himself all over, searching for the first spikes of metal forming from within.

    THREE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Jossua Elmantoz had helped force the Mages from Noreela and felt magic forsaking the land. Now, crossing the mountain range southeast of Lake Denyah, he knew that they were back. Magic had returned, changing the world into a constant state of twilight. The only explanation for this that made sense was that the Mages once again had magic for themselves. They had found the boy Rafe Baburn and extracted the seed of magic he carried; forced it