If you haven't yet read DUSK, then read no further, because here be spoilers ...

Extract #1

Extract #2

Extract #2:

            O’Gan Pentle stared at the moons and craved a sign of hope.  He searched between the shades of dusk for the shapes of stars he knew, and perhaps those he did not.  But there were no stars to be seen.  And though the sound of panic had been prevalent in Hess since the sun had failed to rise, he refused to submit to its lure.  It would be too easy to curl up and cry, find a dark corner in which to await the inevitable doom.  That act took no courage, only resignation.  It would gain him nothing.  The Mystics had been following events and divining news from the sun and stars, and the fall of dusk had been the clearest sign of all.  The Mages were coming, and when they attacked New Shanti with their inevitable army of Krotes, death would make equals of them all.

O’Gan had been atop the Temple for the last two days.  Other Mystics had come to begin with, sitting with him and trading ideas, fears, hopes.  They walked the Temple’s roof and inhaled at the Janne plants, breathing in their mystic pollen and closing their eyes to read the visions it inspired.  Most of them ended up frowning and sniffing again.  Their collective mind remained blank, as though darkened by whatever had stolen light from the day.  O’Gan had conversed with many other Mystics, and though his conviction that the end was not yet here remained as strong as ever, eventually the others had slipped away.  He was sad to see them go.  Many of them were friends, and he felt a certain betrayal at their desertion, but there was also unease at being the only one to remain up here for so long, waiting for a sign.  Was he wrong?  Was hope truly lost? 

            Two hours ago, one of the Elder Mystics had come to talk to him.  She had been told of O’Gan’s solitary watch on the Temple platform, and came to see for herself.  It was the first time she had climbed those steps for years, and he heard her coming from a long way off.  Her breath was harsh, her groans of pain loud as bones ground together in her knees, and O’Gan moved to the head of the steps to welcome her up.  He believed that this was a turning point for the Mystics.  He looked out over Hess – still burning lights proudly into the dusk – and a sense of immense pride had flooded him.  It warmed him against the dark, emboldened him against the terrible times to come, yet as he held out his hands to help the Elder Mystic onto the Temple’s highest point, her voice slashed him like a knife.

            “You’re a fool, Pentle, to even think of hope.”

            He was so taken aback that he could not respond. 

            “The Mystics are fleeing Hess, those who have not already taken their own lives.  The Guiders have already gone.  Politicians!”  She shook her head.  “The future is a place darker than the Black, and to stay here will be to call doom onto your shade.”

            “My shade is strong,” O’Gan said.  “We’ve lived with fear forever, and only now will we let it defeat us?” 

            “There’s a difference between bravery and stupidity.  We’ve lived bravely, O’Gan, but Hess is no place to make a stand.  It’s a Mystic city, not built for war.  And the Mages … the Krotes …”  She trailed off, dropping to her knees near the edge of the Temple and trying to catch her tears as they fell.

            “We can’t just give them the city without a fight!”

            “They’ll take it without a fight,” the Elder said.  “It’ll be a slaughter!  They’ll ride across the desert, fly in across Sordon Sound, and anyone left will be butchered.  Back in the heart of New Shanti, in the hills of Mallor where O’Neakin stood, that’s where we’ll make our stand.  Not here on the edge.”

            “But you can’t just give up.  Hess is our home!”

            “We have no true home on Noreela.  We’re merely borrowing this place.”

            “A thousand years of history and you still feel misplaced.”  O’Gan sighed.  “That’s why I never wish to become an Elder.  Bitterness like that must eat at you.  Do your insides melt under such sourness?”

            “It’s history, and history is a fact, O’Gan.”

            “History can wallow in my waste.”

            The Elder looked up, and the darkness seemed to hold its breath.  “Ahh,” she said, “the true wise words of a Mystic.”  She stood and started back down the steps.  They curved around the outside of the tall Temple, like a giant snake wrapped around a column. 

O’Gan walked to the edge of the roof and watched her go.  He should call down to her, he knew, and talk of hope and defiance in the face of the Mages’ return.  They should discuss how their army should be placed, where the fight would be best entered into, how many Shantasi warriors would come back to their homeland from across Noreela now that dusk had fallen and war was close.  But the Elder shuffled onward, and in her determined gait O’Gan saw no room for thinking of this sort.  She believed that every step brought death closer.  He was not the one to shake those beliefs. 

 

Extract #1:

            The Mages made more machines.

            Lenora’s concerns about their strength were unfounded, for each new act of creation seemed to make them stronger.   

            They dragged rock up from the ground with a flick of their wrists, molded it, dipped it into the sea or brought the water up onto the harbour to cool and cast it into shape.  Some of the remaining hawks were slaughtered and their flesh and blood put to use, clothing the machines and lubricating the joints between the stone limbs.  Angel used metal from the frontage of one building to cast one machine, giving it spikes and barrels to shoot forth stones and molded metal balls when it was brought to life.  S’Hivez broke down a storage hut and used the timber to make a spider-like construct that would carry its rider low to the ground, its many legs making it fleet.  The stench of magic hung across the harbour.  Each time a machine was completed a nervous Krote was called forward, connected to that machine as Lenora had been attached to her own, and then they mounted and rode along the harbour wall.  Unnatural silhouettes were splayed across the water, cast by the weak light from the taverns and other buildings along the harbour.         

            The creation went on for a long time.  Angel and S’Hivez made the first few machines together, merging ideas and raw materials to make several similar constructs: four legs, tall as a Krote, fire vents and slots that could eject sharpened discs.  Then Angel suddenly jumped into the harbour, sinking beneath the water and raising a wave that crashed against the mole.  When she lifted herself back out on a column of steam, she drew a ruined ship up from the depths along with her.  Its timbers bent to her will: its rusted metal twisted and shed its coating.  Ropes and chains swirled about her head, and she clothed her new machine in a dead hawk’s hide.  It seemed a mess, but when she motioned a Krote across and joined her with the new machine, its ropes began to whip and its chains to flail.

            The Krote stood on the thing’s back and urged it toward a timber house at the harbour’s edge.  In the space of a few heartbeats, the house was in ruins.

As Angel moved on to another creation, the waterfront was soon lit by various fires as the Krotes experimented with their weapons of war.  A couple of buildings erupted into flames, but mostly the warriors kept the fire to themselves, learning how to manipulate their machines’ limbs, bodies or other parts – juggling flame, swiping with cutting things, becoming accustomed to the poison vents in their mounts’ hides or the places where discs and arrows could be loaded and ejected.  The whole scene was cast onto the water as grotesque, dancing shadows.

            Lenora walked her own machine amongst her Krotes, already comfortable with how it felt beneath her, and how she could touch its most basic mind with her own.  But this was far different from the hawks, she realized.  This thing was not really alive.  It had not evolved or grown out of nature: it had been created, and it had no purpose other than to follow her bidding.  It would not require food or water, sleep or rest.  Lenora thought back to the final days of the Cataclysmic War.  The Mages’ machines had been mighty, but there had been something missing from them that was already evident in these new constructs: a spark of consciousness.  The war machines of old, driven by magic though they were, had relied on their riders to initiate every move, gears and magical power routes cast into their bodies and often subject to fault or damage.  Now, these new machines were part construct, part animal.  They had the stone and metal, flesh and blood of the old machines, but these conjoined elements were more than just building blocks; they made the machines whole.

            The Mages had twisted their new magic even further than before.