Dawn by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

to bloom to their own calling, twisted it once again to their own desires. The very thing he had spent his long life trying to prevent had happened. He had failed. The Red Monks were lost. They would die and fade into obscurity, reviled and cast as demons, when in reality it was this that they had been striving to prevent all along.
    The end of Noreela.
    Jossua walked on because there was nothing else for him to do. He still held on to hope, because without hope there was only death. But everything felt empty and pointless, each movement without meaning and every thought existing only to drift away and be lost to history. Nobody would know if he lay down and died in these mountains. He would become food for scavengers. Or perhaps the carrion creatures would eschew his old, rotten meat—too tough for them, too strange—and leave him to rot into whatever the land was becoming.
    Noreela would change. The Mages were not here for control or power. This time, they came for revenge.
    But his rage roared on. His anger at the Mages, his fury at his own Monks’ inability to halt magic’s path across the land—a boy, it had only been one boy !—drove him onward. That, and the faintest idea that hope could never be fully extinguished.
    Something slinked out of the night and came toward him, a wild animal stinking of old dead flesh and growling deep within its throat. Jossua paused and scanned the shadows; his eyes were bad, and dusk stole what vision he still retained. He saw a shadow within shadows, and when it moved it was huge.
    The creature growled, and Jossua growled back.
    Footsteps scampered away into the night. Jossua growled again, to himself this time, and he relished the sense of fury filling him, flushing his face with blood, singing into his sheathed sword and demanding that something wet its pitted metal.
    He continued on toward Kang Kang. His aims were changed now, but his final destination must surely be the same. There was only one place left on Noreela where perhaps he could find answers, and where hope may yet dwell: the Womb of the Land.
    And he had a map.

    KOSAR HAD NEVER felt so wretched. His thoughts lay with A’Meer, and Rafe, and how he had let them both down. He should have remained in those woods with A’Meer, and perhaps together they could have fought their way to the machines’ graveyard, covering each other’s retreat. And Rafe…if Kosar had jumped at his legs and held tighter, or launched himself at the Mage, or fought with no regard for his own life, maybe then the boy could have been saved…
    He knew that neither of these scenarios would have been possible, yet he played them out perpetually in his mind. He and A’Meer fighting their way through the woods, ducking sword blows from dozens of Monks, jumping from tree to tree and scoring hits without being wounded themselves. A’Meer’s face, grim yet determined. Blood splashed on her pale skin. Her dark hair loose from where a Monk’s sword had sliced through the band.
    If they’d gone toward New Shanti instead of following Rafe’s suggestion that had taken them to the graveyard, maybe they would have survived. Kosar sighed. “The Mages would have found us in the open,” he whispered. “Come down on their hawks and cut us to ribbons. Or the Monks would have reached us first and slaughtered us out on the plains, or at the edge of the desert. At least back there, we had a chance.” He shook his head. What chance? A chance to follow chance just a little while longer, only to see it snatched away?
    He looked up at the sky. The death moon hung full and heavy, and the life moon skimmed the horizon. Their combined light gave the land a dim illumination, bright enough for Kosar to examine his wounded fingers. They were still bleeding. He used to welcome the pain because it told him that he was still alive. Now the rest of his body hurt more.
    “She’s asleep again,” Trey said.
    Kosar jumped. He had not heard the fledge miner approach.