Dawn Read Free Page A

away. The boy’s corpse was no more.
    Angel lowered her hands and stepped back. Lenora saw that she was panting slightly, her shoulders stooped a little too much, and she wondered again at how much this new magic was draining the Mages. But then Angel looked at her, and behind her smile Lenora saw a strength she had never witnessed before. Not just physical strength—Angel had always been strong—but a strength of purpose. There was no doubt in Angel, and no fear. She was unstoppable.
    “Here it is,” Angel said. She pointed back at the machine. “And here you are.”
    Lenora fell to her knees. She clasped her hands to her head and pressed, trying to squeeze out the thing she felt inside. She was intimately aware of the strange life that had just been created, and even as she felt Angel’s calming touch and heard her soothing words, she knew that this was something never meant to be.
    Take care, Angel whispered in her mind, you’re strong, Lenora, and this is feeble and weak—a machine, a tool for you to command and use. It lives like an animal down a hole, not like you, not like a proud Krote come to conquer and claim. Its half-life is less than a hawk’s shit, but you are linked to it now by this touch. And Angel withdrew from her mind, leaving that link in place.
    Lenora took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She was looking directly at the machine where it stood awaiting her touch. She sensed its unnatural shade drawing back in fear.
    The machine moved.
    The Krotes gathered across the harbor gasped. This is the first time they’ve seen magic, Lenora thought. She was the only one here, other than the Mages, who had been alive during the Cataclysmic War. These other Krotes were fifth- or sixth-generation descendants of those who had fled Noreela, tall or short, dark-skinned or light, the blood flowing in their veins merged with that of the many tribes they had found on Dana’Man and its satellite islands. They were fighters, warriors, true to the Mages and faithful in their pledges. But they had only ever heard of magic, never seen it. Never touched it.
    Lenora looked around at her captains and saw their fear, and realized that this was a defining moment in the history of the land. Everything had changed when the Mages caught the boy, took his magic and stripped his soul, and now that change was about to envelop the whole of Noreela. What she did now would dictate her own part in that change, and what would follow.
    Lenora walked forward, approaching what she perceived to be the front of this machine. As she drew closer she saw that it had the semblance of a face. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, the machine was staring at her.
    It had several eyes, placed at various points around its bulbous head. Two of them were looking at her. It was too dark to see their color, but she knew that they were not the eyes of a hawk. She lifted her chin and glared back.
    The machine lowered itself, stone underside settling on the ground, and Lenora climbed onto its back. It stank of something more elemental than scorched flesh. It smelled, Lenora realized, of magic.
    She sat astride the machine’s back and rested her hands on two bony protuberances on either side of its head. Stand, she thought, and the machine raised itself on several stone legs. It shivered beneath her, the vibrations traveling up her thighs and into her stomach. It gave a strange sexual quality to her fear, tingling her skin and causing her old wounds to ache as if craving the knife, the blade, the arrow once again. Walk, she thought, and the machine took its first hesitant steps. She could feel its inner workings throbbing beneath her: no heartbeat, but something that felt like a fire being stoked; no breathing, but gasps as gas was blown out and air sucked in. Turn, and the machine paused at the edge of the harbor, a step away from tumbling into the sea, and rotated to face her Krotes.
    The Mages watched. Even