Dahli wanted to meet again.
CHAPTER 9
As always, Dahli left a trail of directions, each leading to the next, with no clue as to when Tyen would encounter him. The trail was not old, since a few of the directions had been left with people earlier in the morning or afternoon, or the night before. Yet some of the places Dahli had left them were oddly unreliable.
In particular, in worlds at war.
Such worlds had a stink about them, both physical and mental. It was the mingled stench of death, sickness, misery and terror. The smell was a warning not just of the risk of violence and horror, but of becoming trapped in a world stripped of magic.
Whenever Tyen had stumbled upon such signs before, he’d beaten a hasty retreat. Now he had to trust that Dahli wouldn’t lead him somewhere dangerous. The trouble was, if Dahli had decided to eliminate Tyen for some reason, leading him into a dangerous or dead world was likely to be part of that plan. The next step would be to ambush Tyen with the help of several well-strengthened sorcerers. So when Tyen found himself in a weak, war-torn world, he quickly backtracked. Moving through three relatively peaceful, magically rich worlds, he gathered a good measure of magic from each. Fortified, he returned to the weaker world to continue along Dahli’s path.
The scorched, silent landscape was threaded with lines of men, women and children of all ages, laden down with all manner of objects. From their minds he learned that they were fleeing a battle in the nearby city. The closest of these locals saw Tyen arrive, and though they gave him frightened stares they did not quicken or slow their pace.
Dahli’s directions instructed Tyen to skim to the north to a city called Iuhin, so Tyen stopped only long enough to catch his breath, then skimmed away. Iuhin, the directions had explained, was surrounded by a park of ancient trees. On windy days the citizens, when considering a love match, would let loose scraps of cloth with their names stitched on, attached to paper sails. If their “wishes” became tangled in the trees, it was considered a good sign and confirmation of a good match.
He stopped to breathe on the outskirts of another city. People were fleeing this one too. From them he was surprised to learn that he was actually standing outside Iuhin. No green area surrounded a city wall. Instead, all was ash. Hundreds of columns of smoke billowed up from within a great circle of rubble. As he looked closer, he made out what was left of the trees—blackened skeletons clawing upwards from scorched ground.
He skimmed closer, arriving a hundred paces away to catch his breath again, creating a shield in case sorcerer warriors still lingered nearby. The air tasted of ash. People bent with age or sickness, or merely dazed with shock, straggled past him along a nearby road. Among them rolled carts pulled by teams of small, shaggy-pelted animals, piled high with fine furniture. Well-dressed men and women huddled on board. Drivers shouted and lashed out with whips when those on foot did not move out of the way fast enough.
So when shouting came from the direction of the city, Tyen did not pay attention. Neither did the people near him at first. But as it grew louder he detected a note of warning and soon all began to turn and search for the source. A man hurried in their direction, riding two of the small animals that hauled the carts, on a saddle designed to link the pair together. They were galloping as fast as they could bear him, ash erupting at each strike of their hooves.
As he bore down on them, the crowd fell silent. A soft distant tinkling, like thousands of clocks ticking, became audible. Shouts of alarm rang out, followed by screams. Suddenly everyone was running or shuffling as fast as they could away from the city.
Tyen looked past the approaching man and a movement drew his attention. Water was flowing over the ground, but with uncanny speed and defying gravity by flowing up the slope towards him. As it neared it grew sharp-edged and metallic. It steered towards the man as his steeds slowed to pick out a path across rough ground. Before Tyen could make out what it was, the stuff caught up with them. Fire blasted up and surrounded both man and beasts, so sudden and shocking that Tyen let out a shout of surprise.
A shrill sound escaped the beasts and man as they fell and began to writhe on the ground. More flares burst around them, and in moments they were still.
Stunned, Tyen could only watch as more of the deadly stuff flowed towards him. He resisted the terror urging him to run. Instead he widened his shield of stilled air to form a wall protecting the fleeing people, and strengthened it until it began to frost. Small, mechanical bodies surrounded him. Each had a spherical body, with six legs to carry it forward.
Insectoids!
No attempt had been made to make these look like insects or any living form, however. They were moving, self-targeting bombs, and no more. As each encountered his shield, it vanished in a great gust of flame. From beyond him came screams. He spun around. Another wave of insectoids coming from a different direction had reached the stragglers, the mechanical bodies crashing through them like a wave. Burning bodies thrashed. Tyen began smashing at the insectoids, but they moved too quickly and wove among the people so he was in danger of hitting them instead.
Those he struck still burst into flame. He smashed one just before it reached its intended victim, but the fire scorched the man’s back anyway. Then another, hidden by the uneven ground, reached the injured man and finished him. Though Tyen tried again and again to stop the insidious little machines, there were too many of them, they were too fast, and they were too often hidden by the uneven ground, sneaking up on people before Tyen saw them.
Then suddenly there were none. Tyen looked around and his stomach dropped. All of the stragglers were dead. The screams he was hearing now were distant—another group running away. He sought the source of their fear and found another wave of death flowing towards them. With no people in the way, Tyen was able to smash at it until all of the insectoids had exploded.
Relieved that he had been able to help some of the people, Tyen turned to stare at the city, searching for other deadly floods of machines. He found none. Whoever had sent them must be there, however. Perhaps through that person he’d find out who had made such terrible weapons. He clenched his fists. When he did find whoever had distorted and perverted the gift of knowledge he had passed on to the worlds he would … his rising anger faltered.
Do what? Kill them?
Tyen sighed as his rage shrivelled and died. If not kill them, then what? Threaten them? Beg them to stop? Make them promise not to misuse his invention? He doubted anyone who’d made these flame machines would hold to such a vow once Tyen was gone.
Still, if I head for the city I might be able to get hold of one of the insectoids to study, and perhaps find another way to stop them. He’d have to find a way to stop them exploding when he touched them though.
He doubted anything was left of Dahli’s message, but decided to check anyway. As he skimmed past the city fringe, he paused to examine one of the fallen and burned trees. And silently cursed.
Tyen follow, was slashed into the charred trunk, written in the Travellers’ language.
He stopped to breathe and deliberate. Dahli would not lead him past dangerous worlds if he could avoid it. Perhaps he did not have the time to find a way around them. Perhaps the reason for summoning Tyen was too serious to waste time skirting this world. Baluka was already hunting for insectoids for Tyen to study.
I have to follow Dahli.
Taking a deep, smoky breath he pushed out of the world. Sure enough, a fresh path led away. He pushed himself along it. The scorched city faded to white.
The new world that materialised looked peaceful, much to his relief. He emerged on a flat plain divided into many fields of crops. The air was fresh. The sky was a clear greenish-blue. In a nearby field, several people were bent double, harvesting stalks of rust-orange grain and stuffing them into two huge baskets, which they hauled along as they worked.
It was a relief to be greeted by such a peaceful scene. But something about them set the back of his neck tingling. He withdrew
from the world and skimmed closer. The workers’ movements were sharp and hurried. As he arrived at the edge of the field, the closest of them saw him and jumped. They glanced over their shoulders then quickly turned back to their task.
Following their gaze, Tyen saw a woman walking along the centre of the field over the stubble of harvested crop, keeping pace with a large cart. Workers with full baskets had hauled them onto their shoulders, and were running to a cart to empty them.
The woman was staring at Tyen. As Tyen met her gaze, she made a half bow. Looking into her mind, Tyen saw that she was a weak sorcerer, but had until recently been employed by the city of her birth to take care of small tasks required of a sorcerer for the benefit of the citizens. It had been an easy, peaceful life.
Then emissaries had come from the Wexel, a warlike people of a nearby world. Faced with certain defeat by a stronger force of sorcerers and their dreadful machines, the people of this world had joined forces with the invaders instead. That meant adopting the Wexel’s enslavement of farmers and the poor to perform menial tasks. Attaching “latches” to the slaves ensured none could rise against their masters, new and old. The mechanism required a sorcerer to be present, so the woman’s quiet life had been replaced by one far from home, stuck in fields like this or trying to keep order in the nearby slave quarters.
Seeing the device in the woman’s mind, Tyen felt his heart sink. He looked at the nearest worker. Sure enough, something was nestled at the back of his neck, thin legs encircling the throat. The worker’s discomfort radiated from his mind, and fear of the pain the machine would inflict at the instruction of the sorceress, or the instant death that came if anyone but her or her kind tried to remove it. Yet it could not see the hatred fermenting there. The woman no longer noticed, used to the resentment she saw in all of them. Not my fault, she thought as she yelled at them to hurry up. Maybe it would have been better if we’d all died, fighting an unwinnable battle, than enslaving most of our people.
Appalled, Tyen stood paralysed. He could not do anything to help them here and now, but he did not want to accept that. Even if he persuaded the woman to release these people, someone higher in this world’s hierarchy would soon come to deal with them. Liberating them would require dealing with the masters, and the Wexel, and that would take time and careful planning. He had enough responsibility trying to stop Murai invading Doum.
A shout drew his attention back to the field. Seeing the woman striding forward, Tyen sought the source of her interest. Through her eyes he saw scorched and flattened crops. More of this, she thought. It’s as if someone has been writing on the ground with fire.
Writing on the ground …? Tyen withdrew from the world a little and skimmed higher. Sure enough, characters had been burned into the field. First was an arrow, then the characters for “ruins,” “pool,” “gather magic” and “follow.”
Keeping a hundred strides or so above the ground, he skimmed in the direction indicated by the arrow. The plain stretched endlessly, and he had to stop twice to breathe. At last he noticed variation within the crops, paler areas forming circles and rectangles. From above it looked much like the streets and buildings of a city. Then the first non-flat feature he’d seen in the world so far appeared. A small hillock rose above the plain, upon it fragments of walls, and at the summit was a small, smooth pond.
He paused beside the pool to refresh his lungs and gather more magic, then pushed into the place between. No path led out of the world, but as he moved to hover over the pool, he found a fresh one leading down under the surface. He followed, and once his head was under the level of the water, the trail led away from the world.
The watery light bleached to white, then new shapes began to gain colour around him. It was all rock, with only the occasional grey, wiry plant surviving in cracks here and there. He arrived with a jolt, his senses deceived by the paleness and dustiness of his surroundings into thinking he was further from arriving than he had been.
The air was dry and cold, and a constant breeze whistled in his ears. The ground was hard and covered in dust. Looking down, he saw another arrow, and characters carved into the stone. “Be frugal with magic, as you’ll find little here.”
A shiver ran down Tyen’s spine. He looked around with his mind, and reeled. He hadn’t noticed the void because no magic remained to contrast with it. Though … he noticed something like mist at the edge of his senses. Concentrating, he saw that it was magic, weak and thinly spread. It flowed from the direction Dahli’s arrow pointed.
Pushing out of the world a little, he skimmed in that direction.
The source was not far away. It might have taken a day to walk there. A darker smudge appeared in the pale landscape and at first he thought he was approaching a low forest of the twisted trees. But soon it fragmented, and he recognised tents, carts and piles of objects of all shapes and sizes from barrels to boxes to sacks.
Rising a little higher, he made out a huge encampment the size of a city. Most of the occupants lay sleeping, but a few were huddled together at the edges, within walls made up of objects piled on top of each other. Apart from a few individuals bearing armour and weapons, most of the encampment was made up of ordinary people.
Judging that he needed to breathe, Tyen dropped down to an area of sleepers, not wanting to frighten those still awake, but as he reached the ground he held back from arriving. The closest of the sleepers lay with eyes open. Eyes filmed with white and rimed with dust. He looked at the next, and next.
Dead. They were all dead. Suddenly the groups huddling within makeshift walls made sense. They were fortifications, protecting the few survivors of whatever disaster had occurred here.
He had no choice but to emerge in the world. Expecting a stench from so many bodies, he was surprised when the smell of decay was not that strong. No creatures, large or small, appeared to have been feasting on the corpses, and it was as dry and cold as where he had first arrived in this world.
What happened here? he wondered. And why did Dahli want me to see this? Because it seemed obvious that the sorcerer did—and perhaps the last two worlds too. Did Dahli want him to see the effect of weaponised insectoids? Looking around Tyen saw no sign of mechanical magic here. But the dead were of all ages, men and women, of varying wealth, much like those who had been fleeing the flame machines. He had not seen a city nearby, or even the tracks of such a large body of people. They must have arrived from another world. But why come here, where there was no magic, or water, or life? Tyen sought the minds of those sheltering within their fortifications, and found the answer.
These people had fled a great enemy in their world only to become trapped in here. Their sorcerers had united to find and transport their people to a new world. They’d mapped a path, making sure each world they passed through was safe and full of magic.
The sorcerers had claimed that this world was full of magic mere hours before they’d arrived. They said that someone must have stripped it all away since their visit. Their sorcerers had then gone in search of water, walking because there was no magic. Some suspected the sorcerers had left because they would be blamed for stranding their people in a dead world, doomed to die of thirst or starve.
Tyen had heard that worlds were being stripped of magic. Had these people been stranded deliberately, or had some unknown sorcerer greedily taken all the magic, not knowing that they were about to pass through this world?
It doesn’t matter who is to blame, one of the survivors was thinking. We’ll all be dead soon. His group’s supplies would not last much longer, and they didn’t have the strength to raid another’s. Look what we’ve descended to, he thought, listing the crimes of his fellow survivors, who’d turned to murder, torture and even cannibalism. He knew he would not accept rescue now, if it came. It would mean living with the knowledge of what he had done. I only wish I am dead before my brother returns—if he does—and can read the truth from my mind. He stared off at a distant rocky formation, where he’d last seen his sibling
walking away among the sorcerers, and wondered if he was already the last of his family alive.
Pushing out of the world, Tyen rose above the encampment and located the formation. He skimmed towards it, then stopped to search for minds. Nothing. He travelled on, hoping he had enough magic to do this and still get out of the world again. Soon he’d travelled further than anybody could have walked in the time since the people had arrived, but found no minds. The sorcerers were probably dead.
Returning to the encampment, Tyen discovered that a battle had taken place in this absence. The last of the survivors lay dead of their wounds or exhaustion. Roaming through the camp, he searched for a clue for where Dahli had meant him to go next. Had the man known these people were here, but done nothing to help them? The possibility angered him. But I didn’t either. I could have taken the survivors out of this world straightaway, then returned to look for the sorcerers, if only I’d thought of it sooner.
He reached the centre of the camp. A space had been cleared, bodies and tents pushed aside. On the ground a single character had been carved. “Follow.” Dahli’s instruction. Tyen pushed out of the world. The path was very fresh, as if Dahli had been there not very long before Tyen had arrived.
The pale world faded. A wide, oval grassy area replaced it. An arc of tiers or steps rose up it on three sides, suggesting basic seating for an audience. Objects were scattered over both. Looking closer, Tyen saw that they were the same sorts of sacks and boxes from the encampment. This was the world from which the people had fled.
Some sort of enemy had driven them away. He maintained a strong shield and climbed the stairs. A city came into view. Large public buildings and residences lined streets bordered by carefully maintained gardens. Colourful decorations, perhaps for a festival, still hung from lamp posts. Yet everything was quiet. Not one human roamed the thoroughfares.