Dusk by Tim Lebbon Page A

more yet. Though how you survived . . . ?”
    She was suddenly not threatening at all. Rafe had been scared of her at first—those tattoos, her grabbing his cock, the simple fact that someone in this sprawling, ugly town had noticed him—but now he heard his mother’s tone in her worried words, sensed a level of concern outweighing any intent to hurt or abuse.
    In a way, it felt as if she knew him.
    “How do you know me?”
    “I don’t. But I know what you’ll know and what you’ll seek. I’m honored, boy, and amazed, and I think perhaps I’m only dreaming here. But for now no more, eh? Let’s keep our lips sealed and our minds our own. Get off the street, get hidden, that’s the priority for you right now. Follow me, keep quiet, and in a few minutes we’ll be safe and we can talk. And listen. Only I guess I’ll be doing the listening. I have been for all these years, watching and listening . . .”
    “I don’t—”
    “Understand. Yes. Boy, what’s your name?”
    “Rafe Baburn.”
    “Pleased to meet you, Rafe. I’m a witch, as you rightly said, and a whore in with it too. My name’s Hope. There’s irony in that, because it’s the name I took for myself years before I knew that’s what I’d spend my life doing: hoping. Praying to the Black and the sleeping gods and the bloody shitting Mages if I had to that . . . well, we should go.”
    Rafe did not understand the witch’s ramblings and he thought that perhaps she’d lost her mind. She showed no signs of rhellim usage, none of the side effects of fledge, and her breath smelled of old cabbage and bad meat, not alcohol. But she talked nonsense. A strange nonsense. A nonsense directed at him and about him. He missed his mother. He missed his father. And now this woman, this witch-whore called Hope, wanted to take him home.
    “I’m very hungry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten since . . . since I saw my parents killed.”
    The sympathy that filled her eyes could not be faked. “Oh Rafe,” she said. “Come with me. Then we can talk.”
    Hope grabbed Rafe’s hand and pulled him quickly into the mouth of a narrow alley. And they entered another world.
                   
    IT WAS A city within the city. Rafe smelled it before seeing anything, wafts and hints of what was about to be revealed drawing them through the alley; the strong, mysterious tang he had sensed up on the hillside, and the vague aroma of old alcohol that he knew from Trengborne. But there were other smells here too, rich aromas that seemed to emanate from the moss-covered walls of the alleyway, strong and weak, sickly and dry, inviting and disgusting. He breathed in deeply and gagged on the stink of shit, and his next breath caused a stirring in his loins as rhellim fumes stroked his mind. Contradictions and confusions accompanied him as he followed Hope away from the bustle of the Pavisse he could just understand and into the hidden city he could not.
    They turned the final corner of the alley. He should have expected something like this, he supposed. No varied raft of smells like that would come from a few vagrants sleeping rough beneath the skins of stolen furbats. But it still came as a shock when he saw the hundreds of people, the alley widening into a street, the chaos of a town that seemed so different from the one he had just left. Back there Pavisse was a rough place built well, a once-proud town turned sour after the Cataclysmic War had robbed it of magic. Here . . . it was newer, Rafe knew, but a place such as this did not thrive on hope. It lived off bitterness and crime, desperation and hate. It had been formed after the Cataclysmic War and was a product of it.
    The street curved into the distance, passing beyond view maybe five hundred steps away. Some of the buildings may have been the rear facades of those he had just passed in Pavisse’s main street, but back here they were deformed, half-collapsed, mutated by the additions and changes wrought by their