Dusk by Tim Lebbon Page B

strange inhabitants. A heavy machine formed part of one building, its use long since forgotten but its exposed innards curving up toward the sun, making room for a few tall, thin fledgers to lie back and chew their drug. The machine was rusted where it was metal, smoothed by time where it was stone, and there were bones too, the flesh of its biological parts long since rotted away and added back to the ground. The building had seemingly grown around it, and Rafe wondered what had been here first: machine or construction. Perhaps one had been to support the other, although Rafe could not now guess at which way this could have worked.
    There were more machines, small and large, a few with obvious uses—those that had moved as transport, others that had probably once ploughed and planted in the fields—but most with purposes lost in the turbulent mists of time. They were all incorporated in some way, chopped and changed and altered as if those that had used them were frustrated at their lack of animation. The channels were there within these machines, the empty reservoirs and sacs and current routes that had given them the strange life they once lived, but they were dead. Dead as the sand beneath the dwellers’ feet, dead as the air they exhaled, dead as the corpses Rafe saw in the gutter in one or two places. There was a fledger, his or her body twisted and ripped from whatever had killed it. There was also something else, something that must once have been fodder because of its size, exposed ribs torn back and knotted by the accelerated growth, slabs of flesh and muscle ripped from its wet corpse. As he watched, disgusted and terrified, a small lizard darted from a rent beneath one of the larger machines, buried its nose in the fodder and darted away again, dinner in its mouth.
    The fodder shifted, turning its misshapen head and uttering a low, wretched groan.
    “Mage shit!” Rafe exclaimed.
    “Leave it be,” Hope said, walking by without giving the pitiful thing a second glance.
    Help, it hissed. Rafe looked down, but the fodder was not looking at him. Perhaps the sound of its plea had simply been air escaping its slashed neck.
    “Leave it be!” Hope said again. She’d turned back to him now, conveying the same message within her stare. Rafe glanced around. A few people were watching him. A female fledger, bald, eyes yellow as a rancid wound, beckoned him over with one impossibly long finger. She was naked, and hung from a twist of metal and stone with one hand. Her body was speckled with soft black spots. It looked as if she were rotting from the inside.
    “Fun, stranger?” she said. Her voice was strangely quiet, high, musical. Almost hypnotic. “Fun with me, stranger?”
    “Not with you, no!” Hope said.
    The fledger hissed and dropped from her perch, landing on the street wide-legged and crouched into a fighting stance.
    “Paid you already, has he?” she hissed.
    “He’s with me, yes,” Hope said. Rafe glanced sideways and saw that she had one hand inside her jacket. Furbat, he noticed, picking out a crazy detail in this loaded moment. Furbat jacket, so old that the leather was denuded of all fur, shiny with age, darkened with sweat and rain and who knew what else. This jacket had seen its fair share of years and places. How much of this had been upon Hope’s shoulders, and how much on other peoples’?
    The fledger hopped a few steps closer like a jumping spider. Rafe could smell her. Rank, rotten and sad.
    “Fledge, young one, stranger, a bit of fledge with my legs around your face, you’ve never eaten so well!” She thrust her groin forward and displayed the hairless crack there, like a jagged slit in the earth.
    Rafe could not help looking down. There were speckles of fledge across her pale yellow thighs, a mustardy trace that hinted at more drug within.
    “I won’t warn you again,” Hope said. Something in her voice brought a moment of silence, a period of nervous calm. But there were others