Read Dawn for Free Online Page A

reasons for leaving this shade. It has a touch of our magic. Just a touch, but enough to draw up machines and carry on our work.”
    “I could do it,” Lenora said. The Mages were silent, so she continued. “I could give life to the machines, make our army. With magic.” Her words terrified her, but to have even a hint of what they had, an echo…
    I could help my child, she thought. Her daughter’s shade, floating out there somewhere, abandoned and never alive. What I could do with that!
    S’Hivez growled.
    “We’re here to fight a war with Noreela,” Angel said. If she knew what Lenora had been thinking, she gave no sign. “If we hand magic to any living thing, that thing becomes our enemy.”
    “I would never—”
    “You wouldn’t be able to help yourself.” Angel and S’Hivez started to walk away, leaving the shade flexing its shadows across the ground.
    “Is that it?” Lenora said.
    Angel glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “Almost. Watch.”
    The Mages parted and paused at the entrance to a road leading into the heart of Conbarma. The Krotes had seen their approach and quietly moved away, giving the Mages room to work. There was a sense of anxiety in the air, a promise of change.
    Angel and S’Hivez knelt and pressed their hands into the ground. The rock there quickly began to glow, radiating burnt orange spears of light which arced across Conbarma and sizzled out in the darkness. They crawled backward on their knees, increasing the distance between them and enlarging the spread of boiling rock. The surface broke into liquid, and a bubble rose to the surface and burst, sending molten stone pattering down around S’Hivez. He seemed unconcerned, and if any of the lava touched him, it caused no wound.
    Farther back, farther, and when the Mages eventually stood and brought their hands from the ground, they left a pit of fire fifty steps across. Angel glanced back at Lenora and smiled. “From here, the shade will raise machines,” she said.
    She and S’Hivez left the lava pit and approached an area of open ground where the mole was rooted into the mainland. It was here that Angel had first touched Noreelan soil after three hundred years in exile, only two days before but seemingly an age ago. How slowly time passes, Lenora thought, without day or night to mark it.
    The Mages touched the ground again, but this time they hauled rocks up and out without melting them, piling them around the perimeter of the excavation, deepening the hole with every touch. It took only a dozen heartbeats and then they moved back again, S’Hivez’s shoulders sagging as if the effort had tired him.
    Angel came back to where Lenora still sat astride her machine. “And that,” she said, “is the flesh pit. It needs filling, Lenora, before the shade can get to work. It has a touch of magic, but still it needs raw materials.”
    “Will that thing listen to me?” Lenora asked.
    “Shades take no orders from anything alive. But we’ve ensured that it knows its purpose.”
    Lenora looked at the shadow low to the ground, like a wound on reality. “You control it?” she asked. Is that what my daughter is now? she thought.
    “We gave it a promise,” Angel said. “There are many like that one, and they will work for us across Noreela. We’ll give them what they crave, in time.”
    “Life?”
    Angel grinned, and her smile was one that Lenora wished never to see again. “Is there an element of personal interest in this conversation?”
    “My interest is to serve you, Mistress.”
    “Then build me my army, Lenora, and do to Noreela what it did to us so long ago.” Then Angel and S’Hivez departed, melting away into shadows cast by looming buildings.
    Lenora steered her mount between two burning houses. She found a curved alley, emerging into a shadowed courtyard lit only by the sickly light of the death moon. The place seemed undisturbed since their landing here a couple of days before. There was a long table that