Fantastic Metropolis

Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.

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The Dead of Night is a two book dark fantasy due for publication by Night Shade Books in 2004 and 2005. In a world where humanity has been denied magic after its misuse, society is in decline. Apathy is the ruling factor. Machines lay dead in the fields and towns, the mines and farms. And now, the landscape itself is showing signs of this decay. The land of Noreela is becoming a dangerous place to live.

But there are signs of magic’s re-emergence, subtle signs that only those watching for it can see. The Red Monks, an order vowing magic’s destruction. The Shantasi, a mysterious race from beyond Noreela who covet magic for their own needs. And the Mages, those two ancient magicians whose corruption destroyed the magic in the first place. These forces converge on one boy, an innocent farm lad who knows that something strange, something alien, is going on inside his head.

This extract is Chapter One of the first book, Dusk.

—Tim Lebbon

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Chapter One: The Red Monk

When Kosar saw the horseman, the world began to end again.

The man and horse walked towards the village, the rider shifting in fluid time to his mount’s steps. The man’s body was wrapped in a deep red cloak, pulled up so that it formed a hood over his head, shadowing his face. His hands rested on his thighs. The horse made its own way along the road. Loose reins hung either side of its head, its mane was clotted with dirt, its unshod hooves clacked and clicked puffs of dust from the dry trail. Only one man on a horse, and he did not even appear to be armed.

How, then, could Kosar know that death followed him in?

With a grimace he stopped work and squatted. A warm breeze kissed the raw flesh of his fingers—the marks of a thief–and took away the pain for a few precious moments. Blood had dripped and dried into a dust-caked mess across his hands and between his fingers, and they crackled every time he flexed them. The wounds were a permanent reminder of the mistakes of his past.

Kosar decided that the trenches could wait a few minutes more. It had taken two years for the village cabal to get around to digging them; another moment would make no difference to the crops withering and dying in the fields. Besides, they needed much more than water, although most would refuse to believe that this was so. Now there was something more interesting to grab his attention, something that might bring excitement to this measly little collection of huts, homes and run-down dwellings that dared call itself a village.

He stared along the road at the figure in the distance. Yes, only one man, but he seemed to carry a threatening pall about him, like a dark echo of evil deeds he had done. Kosar looked the other way, past the old stone bridge and into the village itself. There were children playing down by the stream, naked and laughing, diving and resurfacing in triumph when they caught a fish between their teeth. Elsewhere, drinkers sat silently stoned outside the tavern, mugs of rough wine festering half-finished in the sun, the other half coursing through veins and inducing a few cherished hours of catatonia. It was a false escape that he, Kosar the thief, would never be permitted again. At least, not where law still applied.

The market was small today, but still traders plied their wares and squeezed rare money and barter from the village folk. Skinned fur-bats hung from hooks along one stall, their livers intact and ripe with lustoza, the drug of sexual abandonment. He had already seen three people skulking away, a fur-bat beneath their shirt and their eyes downcast. Their children may not eat tonight, but at least the parents would be assured of a good screw.

Kosar turned once again to the stranger. He was much nearer now, and the sound of his progress had become audible in the heavy evening atmosphere. The figure raised its head almost imperceptibly. The cloak shifted to allow a sliver of the falling sun inside and Kosar squinted as he tried to make out what it revealed. His eyesight was deteriorating, scorched by decades in the sun and weakened by lack of nourishment, but it had never seemed this bad. Never.

The stranger’s face was as red as his cloak.

Kosar stood and shielded his eyes. His first impulse was to grab for the pick he’d been using, rest it against his leg so he could bring it up in a killing arc if necessary. His second urge was to turn and run, and this surprised him. He’d always been a thief but never a coward. It was why he was still alive now, and it was the reason he could live among people, even with the terrible unhealing brands on his fingers. He shrugged off mockery and hatred and derision, and once past those superficial reactions there was often a common ground of acknowledgement, even acceptance.

He also listened to his hunches. Instinct was for survival, and Kosar followed his as much as possible.

But not this time. Instead, he walked back along the trench towards the bridge. Every step felt heavy, each movement was going against his good sense. Something inside shouted at him to turn and run, abandon the village to whatever fate this masked man brought with him. The place had never really done anything for Kosar. Acceptance, it had given him that grudgingly, but never affection, never any true sense of belonging. They’d put up with him if he worked for them, nothing more. He’d spent the last mid-summer festival skulking and sulking beneath the stone bridge while the town cabal handed out presents of ale and food. The revelry had jibed at him in his own private darkness, even though the jibing was mostly his own.

They had done nothing for him.

Curiosity, then. It had to be his natural inquisitiveness hauling him towards a meeting with this lone horseman, his desire to discover the unknown rather than turn his back upon it. Unmask the masked, as it were.

Turn and run.

But he could not.

Turn and run, Kosar, you bloody fool.

Even though instinct urged him to flee… even though good sense told him fair and square that death’s shadow was already closing around the village… there were children here, playing in the stream. There were women in the village he liked, or would like to like, given the chance. And more than anything, Kosar was a good man. A thief, a criminal, branded forever as untrustworthy and devious, but a good man. He had a sound heart and he knew it. Instinct go to hell.

The horseman was no more than two minutes away from the village. Kosar had almost reached the end of the trench where it joined the stream running beneath the bridge. The children had finished their fishing and run up the bank, and now they sat on the bridge parapet, swinging their legs over the edge, laughing and joking and watching the approaching stranger. Such trust, Kosar thought, in a world where hunger and fear were starting to make trust so precious.

He was about to call out to the children when the horse broke into a gallop.

He could have warned them. He should have shouted at them to turn and run, go to their homes, tell their parents to lock their doors. Kosar had seen enough trouble in his life to recognise its flowering, and he had known from the instant he’d laid eyes on the horseman that he was not here for a drink, a meal, a bed for the night.

He could have warned them, but shouting would have drawn attention to himself. And in this case, instinct won out.

The man in red dismounted on the bridge and approached the children. His horse remained where it had stopped, head bowed down as if smelling water through the thick stone. The kids stood and jumped around and giggled. Kosar glanced along the road into the village and saw several people looking his way, a couple of them striding quickly towards the bridge, one woman darting into the brothel where the three drunken members of the village militia spent most of their time.

For a moment all was still, a real-life oil painting on a disquieting canvas. Kosar paused, unmoving. The breeze died down as if the land itself were holding its breath. Even the stream seemed to slacken, though obviously that was absurd, things like that only happened in myth and legend and–
The man in red spoke. His voice was water running uphill, birds falling into the sky, sand eroding into rock. Where is Rafe BaBurn? he asked. The children glanced at one-another. One of them, a girl, smiled.

Later, Kosar would swear that the man in red never even gave them a chance to answer.

He grabbed the smiling girl by her long hair, pulled his hand from within the red robes and sliced her throat. His knife seemed to lengthen into a sword, as if gorging on the blood smearing its blade, and he flicked it at the air. Three other children clutched at gaping flesh and spilling insides, crying and screaming as they disappeared from Kosar’s view below the bridge parapet. The two remaining boys turned to run and the hooded man caught them, seemingly without moving. He beheaded them both with a flick of his wrist.

Kosar fell to his knees, the breath sucked from him, and rolled sideways into the irrigation trench he’d been digging for the past few days. He cringed at the splash he made, but the hooded man strode across the bridge and into the village. If he heard, he gave no sign. Kosar peered above the edge of the trench and watched between dead brown grasses as the man passed the first house.

The place was stirring. A woman screamed when she saw the devastation on the bridge, others took up her cry and soon the place had come to life. Men emerged from buildings clutching crossbows and swords. Children ran along the street, their eyes widening with a terrible curiosity when they saw their dead friends. Their cries added to the din. Goats and sheeboks scampered through the dust, startled to the ends of their tethers, crying and choking as leather leads jerked them to a standstill. The man in red walked on, the robe still tight around his body, hood over his head. From this angle Kosar was looking at his back, and he was glad. From the glimpse he had caught of the red-faced man, he had no desire to see beneath that hood again.

A woman, mad with grief, tried to run past the man to hug her dead child back together. His arm snatched out and buried the sword in her stomach. He jerked it free without breaking his step, and the woman’s guts stained his robe. Her scream wound down like an echo in a cave. There was another shout from the village, this one male, and the whistling cry of a crossbow bolt boring the air.

It struck the man in the shoulder. He paused momentarily—

This is when he goes down, Kosar thought, and then they’ll fall on him and he’ll be torn to shreds

—and then continued on his way. The bolt protruded from his shoulder, pinning the cloak tighter to his body. The shooter re-primed his crossbow, loaded another bolt and fired again, his eyes blinded with grief but his aim still true. This one struck the man in the face.

Again he paused, his head jerking back with the impact. And again he went on his way once more. And now his pace increased, dust kicking up from beneath his red robe, clotted black with his own spilling blood.

Someone stumbled from the door of the brothel further along the street. It was one of the three militia, naked, flushed and erect from his regular afternoon dose of lustoza. Naked, true, but still prepared, still of sound enough mind to bring his longbow with him. A whore staggered out after him, frenzied from lustoza overdose, grabbing at the soldier’s crotch even as he strung an arrow and sighted on the red-robed man. He nudged the whore aside with his knee. She sprawled in the dust and shouted her rage up at him. The soldier let loose his arrow.

It thudded into the man and its point burst from his back. He stood still for a moment like a red butterfly pinned to the air. The man with the crossbow ran at him, raising his weapon to strike the murderer around the face, knock out his teeth, crush his skull.

The man in red moved so quickly that Kosar barely saw his sword shimmer through the air. The crossbow span across the road and into the stream closely followed by its owner’s head, mouth still wide in a scream, eyes full of a hopeless need for retribution.

Another bolt struck home, fired from somewhere beyond Kosar’s field of view. Another, then another. The man barely paused this time, as if becoming used to the impact of wood and iron, his body adjusting itself around the alien objects puncturing and shredding it. He reached the tavern where the regular drinkers were stirring from thoughtless slumber, and he slaughtered all six of them before they could move. He did it slowly, seeming to relish every thrust and slice of his sword, oblivious to the bolts and arrows pounding into his red robe and body. Then he turned and walked quickly along the street.

The other two militia had emerged from the brothel and all three now stood in the street, ridiculously naked and sweat-soaked and high and hard on lustoza. Their whores huddled back against the brothel door and watched as their men plucked arrows from their quivers, strung, fired, strung and fired again. Each arrow found its mark, and the nearer the man in red came to the militia the more damage they did.

One shaft struck his throat and exited the back of his neck, carrying a stringy mess of gristle and veins with it. The air splashed with blood. Kosar could not believe what he was seeing; the man should be dead! He was a walking cactus—there were two dozen arrows and bolts peppering his body, more hitting home every few seconds—and yet he walked, he swung his sword, he hacked at the villagers, and their bodies spilled blood into the dust. Kosar watched aghast as the lone horseman, his robe exactly the same colour as before but now glistening wet, reached the militia. They stood their ground as they were trained to, wide-eyed and terrified. They stood their ground, caught the swords thrown to them by their whores, engaged the arrowed-peppered figure together, died together. One was split from throat to sternum by a twitch of the blade, another lost his rampant genitals before his guts followed them to the ground. The third soldier, mad and brainwashed brave to the last, ran at the man with the intention of wrestling him into the dust. The robed figure spun at the last instant. The soldier was impaled on his own arrows where they protruded from the man’s back.

With the soldiers taken care of, the massacre of the villagers began in earnest.

The man in red still wore his hood to cover his face. His hands barely seemed to move before another head was rolling, another spill of insides slurping to the ground. And arrows and bolts still thrummed into him.

Time to leave, Kosar knew. He glanced at the bridge, queasy because he had not gone to help those children. But at least this way he still had the stomach to feel sick.

He turned and made his way along the trench on his hands and knees. Each splash in the shallow water was accompanied by a scream from the village, or a groan, or the thud of another useless arrow finding its mark. He’d seen some things in his time, some strange things, some nasty things, some weird and wonderful. But he had never seen a man fighting with thirty arrows letting his blood and twisting up his insides. He’d heard of armour, too, suits of metal that diverted arrows and swords. But he’d seen the blood spray when that arrow hit the horseman in the neck. He’d seen the red mist in the air, heard the sound of metal and wood cleaving flesh. He knew that sound well; he was not mistaken.

He stared to pant, and realised only then that he was panicking. The sounds from the village were receding as he lay distance down behind him. They were worse than before—the screams of children once more—but they were quieter now. Certainly not easier to hear, but less of a threat.

Kosar stopped for a moment and lifted his hands from the muddy water. The ground was full of clay here, hardly ideal for planting crops but perfect for coating unwary crawlers with a blood-red deposit. He hung his head until his long hair dipped in as well, perhaps willing himself to be blooded.

He had done nothing. Those children on the bridge, innocent, ignorant only because their parents were ignorant, so alive, so damn trusting…

He had done nothing.

“Oh gods,” he cried wretchedly.

The noise from the village stopped. No more screams. No more shouts. No more crossbows twanging, bows whispering or swords meeting in sparked fury. Nothing but the slow, methodical footsteps of one man.

Kosar held his breath and raised his head slightly, looking back over this shoulder, the only sound now the thick water dripping from his hair. His hands were slowly sinking into the mud beneath the waters, his wounded fingertips stinging even under the cold caress. It felt like they were pressing into spilled guts and the image horrified him. He was a thief, not a murderer. He’d never killed anyone.

How would he know what spilled guts felt like?

And then he realised. As his eyes drew level with the dried grass and he could see the man in red strolling among the dead, he knew. He knew the feel of guts because he had seen them spilled, smelled their tangy scent, heard the screams of their owners as they tried to catch them and stuff them back in. He knew because he had stood by and watched those children die, helplessly, when he could have shouted to them that this man was danger, this man was death. And because he knew this man, who he was and where he was from. He’d heard tenuous legends, but also met the mercenaries and scholars who vouched for them. He’d listened to stories by campfire light or the smoke-hazed atmospheres of taverns and homes far from here.

The stranger was a Red Monk.

Somewhere in the land, magic was living again.

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The Dead of Night: Dusk will be published in 2004 by Night Shade Books.