Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1)

by Steven Kelliher

  He looked at her, and now he did look like the man he had been, the youth who had split off from Hearth and led his people south.

  “Now I wonder. Was he ever truly on our side? Did the King of Ember bring us to a paradise, or a prison?”

  Ninyeva placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and affected a gentle smile.

  “I imagine he did the best he could,” she said. “Just as we have.”

  Doh’Rah smiled, and together they looked out on the lake that was their home. As the soft afternoon light touched the furthest waves, Ninyeva thought they looked like the shifting dunes of the deserts she had left.

  “The young among us deserve to mark their own path, now,” Ninyeva said after a time. Doh’Rah regarded her. “They were born in a Valley deprived of peace. They deserve better, and they deserve to find it for themselves. I only hope the Eastern Dark has lost some of his potency, if he has returned.”

  “Even a Sage such as he must take care when courting the World Apart,” Doh’Rah said with a frown.

  “We do not know how the conflict goes with the others of his kind,” Ninyeva said. “He could be growing desperate. Why else would he send his Sentinels now?”

  “Why indeed?”

  They parted in the soft gravel of the fishing village, sharing nothing else but the bowed heads that come from long understanding and slow regret. Ninyeva navigated the bustling streets and pathways back toward her leaning tower. The gravel roads close to the shore were choked with people, most of them fishermen. The sun provided the means and incentive to strike out for game in deeper waters, and the men took advantage.

  As she walked, she replayed her previous attempts to travel the winds of the Between. Where had she gone wrong? For a time, she even considered consulting with Rusul and the Seers of Eastlake, but decided against it. They would likely spend more time judging than assisting, no matter the stakes.

  No, she would do this herself. Holspahr and the others needed to know what awaited them in the Deep Lands and beyond. She would worry about how to contact them after she solved the first issue. Perhaps Reyna would get his wish early. The Dark Months were ending, but Ninyeva felt it in her bones that the danger had only just begun.

  She still remembered the winged figure standing on the cliffs as their sorry caravan had trundled through the villages of the Rivermen, their gray eyes suspicious. And she remembered the figure in red that had stood beside him, their Ember King, whom they would never see again.

  How could any despair when they had such figures—such gods—watching over them?

  Ninyeva and hers were refugees, but their children and grandchildren had not chosen to abandon the northern deserts. Their blood was of the sand, but their hearts were in the Valley. Until the Valley betrayed them.

  She took a wide berth around the market, unwilling to be clogged in the various choke ways sprouting from the wheel. When she reached the chipped paint of her front door, the sun was high in the sky, but she knew it would not stay there for long.

  Once inside, Ninyeva removed her green robe and made her aching way up the stairs, closing the shutters and sliding the thin pine frames shut to block out the light, an irony not lost on her. She lit the candles, dusted the pit beneath the grate and built a fire fit for her purposes. She went to the jars in her cubbies and each contained lifelong friends: there was the blue of sage root, wet and pungent. She took a handful of that and lined a stone bowl with it. Next, she grasped the dry, caked mass of yellow sand nettle, which she broke up and added to the mix. The green grass of the Faey gardens joined it, along with the charred fungi from the Blackwoods, its bright red flesh emerging as the blackened shell cracked and dissolved upon mashing.

  The paste churned and as it did the colors turned, affecting a striking hue of orange and purple. The kettle whistled and she added the boiling water with a hiss and bubble that sent up a curling mist thick as cream. Ninyeva allowed herself to drop into the back of her mind and leaned forward, breathing long and deep.

  Somehow, she always forgot about the pain. It hit her like a swarm, the smoke buzzing with an electricity as it moved through her lungs, its product leeching into her blood. The first few seconds marked an eternity of agony, but Ninyeva stepped away from it and watched it pass, as it always did.

  All sights, sounds and smells of her clothes, her room and the salt lake below faded. These were not a part of the Between, but rather the World. The Between was not a place, but it could be something similar. She told it what to be and it complied, though it would rebel with increasing angst. She bade it bring her up, and she felt the rushing of wind and moist clouds thick with the promise of storm. She flew over the deep green canopy of the northern woods and raced along the rivers that fed the green fields of Hearth.

  As she shot north, she felt the pain of the earth and tried not to look, still catching the glaring scars that marked the Deep Lands in her periphery. Gray stone rushed up to meet her, and she climbed the Steps two at a time without touching down. These were great plateaus dotted with fields of green with purple flowers. They were lands bursting with life and absent movement, for none in the Valley dared brave them for fear of the darkness lurking in the shadows of the higher passes and the memory of the fallen Sage that had made them his home.

  Cresting the top now, and the sight stole her breath and nearly threatened to send her careening back. The golden pools and sharp black ridges stood out stark and beautiful, but the lands beyond were indistinct as a brushed painting not yet dry.

  At first it felt like a spider crawling. She twitched and turned, feathered wings wheeling, sharp eyes searching. She felt eyes boring into her, cold with hate. The mind intent on hers betrayed itself, and its intensity sent her spinning. So fractured it was—so mad. There was a power there, but it was scattered and frayed, and it emanated from the red-tipped citadel that had been their guardian’s abode.

  She fled, and as the lands below passed in a blur, she saw the shadows grow long beneath the trees and felt the red eyes glaring up at her as they heard their master’s call. Larger things stirred in the trenches of the Deep Lands and she did not look at these. And there was a beating, like the hearts of giants that followed her south, warping the air around her and setting it to thrum.

  Before she woke, she saw the sky change, the white clouds growing sick with dark, the threat of storm making good its violent promises as blue light broke the horizon. Hearth stood out starkly, red-tipped roofs cloistered within the pearly white walls. The city looked alone, surrounded on all sides by an encroaching darkness, its braziers cold and unlit.

  As she fled, she stole a glance behind, toward the peaks that now stood tall and leering as dark sentries framing a blood-red sun. They vibrated with the beating drums in their guts, with the hidden power trapped therein.

  A power she had just awoken.

  Talmir was a practical man, but his thoughts were want to wander.

  Now, he thought of the many folk living in the Valley, and the many things between folk, from the great beasts of the Untamed Hills down to the shrews in their burrows. The Dark Months had ever been a fact of life for folk of Valley and the lands beyond, but it was not until the World Apart sent its children through that they became something to be feared. Later, something to be endured.

  The whys were debated in the stone huts of the Fork just as they were in the taverns of the Emberfolk. Even the Faey blamed the increasing intrusions on the War of Sages, the residual magic from their clashes spilling over into their relatively peaceful corner and upsetting the balance between worlds.

  Many died in the wilds those first few years. If not for the Runners of the Lake, it was possible that the Emberfolk of the Scattered Villages beyond Hearth and Last Lake would have starved in darkness. After that, the people focused less on the whys. The Valley conflicts had ended a generation before, but the fighters among the Emberfolk, Rivermen and Faey found need of their blades again.

  Though they survived, some argued that life in
the Valley had been no more than a life of waiting on the edge of nightmare, the dawn nothing but a reprieve from the terrors that dogged them. If the Dark Months were a time of war then the dawn was a time of preparation.

  Morbid as the thought was, it made life a hell of a lot simpler for Talmir. He was Captain of the Rock, and he surveyed the green fields before the walls of Hearth.

  Talmir had always been one for preparation. He left no stone unturned, a fact that had resulted in his slow, inevitable ascension through the ranks of the largest Emberfolk settlement remaining in the World. What’s more, Talmir was not Landkist, though he commanded some of the strongest Embers in the Valley.

  The traditionalists still whispered when his back was turned, but he paid them no heed. Talmir’s charge was to keep the people of Hearth safe, whisperers included, and that he did, ensuring that every Ember, soldier, hunter, villager and stray cat within a day’s travel was prepared for the next attack. Under his watch, the great white walls of Hearth had never been breached. He planned to keep it that way, and though the sky was a little more dour now than it was the day before—the threat of storm clouds curling in the distance in an odd change for this time of year, they had made it through another spell relatively unscathed.

  Of course, the same could not be said for his cousins on the Lake, but he had no doubt that First Keeper Tu’Ren had regained control in short order. Much like their own First Keeper, he was not a man to be trifled with.

  Talmir watched the pale sun shine its light on the serpentine river that snaked its way through the rock-strewn fields. It passed beneath Hearth’s portcullis, where dark clouds turned it steel gray.

  The Dark Months were ending.

  Why, then, was he so uneasy?

  Thunder rolled in from the north as if in answer, and the scent of ozone carried on the wind. Talmir was not a superstitious man. He would not have believed there was a White Crest if he had not felt the tremors of the great battle in the passes as a youth, the same battle that pushed the Rivermen south and sparked the early conflicts. His father had played a prominent role in those clashes. It was strange, that Talmir broke bread with the Rockbled along the same Fork that had been stained red not so very long ago.

  Talmir shook the dark thoughts away and walked the battlements. He looked down over the city that was his charge. If Last Lake was the nourishing mouth of the Emberfolk, Hearth was the heart—or the guts, depending on whom you asked. The buildings here were squat and stacked one atop the other as they climbed the crooked, cobbled streets toward the Red Bowl, the great market at the center. The very wall on which he stood was the only thing in sight that had been built with an eye for engineering. It was not lost on him that the Rivermen and their Landkist were mostly responsible for that.

  If Last Lake provided the fish, Hearth provided the hooks.

  A piercing screech assailed him as he was about to descend to the streets below, and Talmir spun to the west. He half expected to see a swarm of Dark Kind pouring from the trees in a last desperate bid for the walls. Instead, he was greeted by a sight jarring in its normalcy: a small, mule-drawn cart laden with rain-wrapped bundles leaned weirdly, one wheel stuck fast in a rut along the stream.

  An old man bent to work over the delay. Talmir could see him cursing as a young woman shouted at him over the reins. The gray mule screamed again, eager to be off, and the Captain shouted orders.

  The grinding gears of the portcullis began their slow rattle, but Talmir’s attention was drawn by something else. A figure emerged from the tree line behind the old man. The figure moved with the predatory grace of a cat, and Talmir thought he glimpsed a flash of ruby red in place of eyes, causing him to rub the sleep from his own.

  His vision cleared, but the scene before him grew no less perilous.

  “Riders!” he screamed, knowing it was too late.

  The old man had barely risen before he was cut down, his head parting neatly from his shoulders. The woman shrieked as the dark figure turned on her, the mule startled at the sudden commotion.

  Talmir silently urged her to run as soldiers raced about him, horns blaring, gears continuing their raucous grinding as the gate rose slow as agony. But she did not run.

  The Captain snatched a silver horn from the nearest courier and blew out a note that cracked the sky apart like fresh thunder. Hearing this, the mule bucked and rushed forward, snapping the reins and sending the woman crashing to the mud. She regained her feet and ran like something hunted. The black figure gave chase, splitting the distance between them with ungainly leaps that erased all lingering doubts as to its inhumanity.

  Finally, the welcome thunder of hooves followed the slam of the gate reaching its zenith, Creyath and his riders pouring forth and carving the fields like a scythe. Even from this distance, Talmir could see the shimmering haze leaking from the Ember’s armor as he bent over his covered steed.

  The dark figure launched itself skyward in a final pounce, and a flaming shaft took it in the chest and sent it rolling in the turf as the horses circled. Creyath signaled for a rider to retrieve the woman, and he swung her onto the saddle and spun toward the gate. As for the Ember, he dismounted and walked toward the black figure. It was difficult to make Creyath Mit’Ahn appear pale, but this creature surely did.

  The dark thing writhed under the Ember’s boot, but he held it fast, lighting another shaft with the fire in his blood and launching it down to split the earth beyond the monster’s skull with a sharp retort. The Ember signaled to Talmir that the deed was done and remounted. He echoed the Captain’s fears as he glanced worriedly toward the western trees before turning back for the city.

  Even as the last of the riders cleared the looming teeth of the raised portcullis, the shadows beneath the distant branches lengthened and took on a life of their own.

  Talmir heard the men and women under his command issue a collective gasp. He could not say he blamed them. The inky shadows resolved into the figures of men as they arrayed themselves in the space between wood and field. One of their company bore the same striking red eyes as the one Creyath had felled. It raised its hand and seemed to glare a challenge over the great expanse before slicing the air.

  The black tide surged forward. Arrows were nocked and braziers lit.

  Before the panic set its hooks too deep, Talmir exhaled. He had his Embers. He had his soldiers. He had his walls. Creyath joined the Captain, the Ember’s skin warming the space around them.

  “The woman?” Talmir asked without turning.

  “Unharmed but for a few scrapes in the mud.”

  “Good.” He paused. “We’ll have to find her a new cart.”

  Linn woke with a startled yelp, her heart throbbing so hard it hurt. She was sweating, and now she was embarrassed as she took in the five pairs of eyes regarding her over the white smoke of a small cookfire.

  “Dream?” Baas Taldis asked.

  “Morning,” she answered without warmth. She stood and stretched immodestly, the Riverman’s eyes roving all the while. Linn was not entirely sure how she felt about him. Baas had always been a quiet sort at the Lake, but the open road seemed to agree with him—or disagree—depending on your perspective.

  Aside from the familiar sights and now-familiar smells of her traveling companions, the ache in her joins returned to Linn her sense of time and place. It was day four of their magnificent, heroic, utterly ridiculous quest. By their looks, she guessed at least half of her companions felt the same. If there was a bright spot, it did not follow any of the three Embers in their company, but rather the fisherman’s son.

  Nathen Swell’s boyish enthusiasm clashed oddly with his impressive forest lore. The same attitude that threatened to drive Larren Holspahr to quiet violence resonated with Linn, Baas and Jenk Ganmeer. Even Kaya Ferrahl shot her glances at him when she was sure none were looking. In truth, Nathen was likely the only member of the group they could all agree on liking, or at least not openly disliking.

  “I, too have had dreams the
se last nights,” Baas intoned gravely, as if Linn had not summarily ignored him a moment earlier. “I thought the sun would burn them all away, but it has strengthened their resolve in an attempt to weaken my own.”

  “Sun’s losing today,” Kaya said, indicating the gray skies.

  “What sorts of dreams?” Jenk asked, sounding genuinely curious. He displayed a keen and unwavering interest in each of them. Linn had yet to decide if it was the politician in him or the heroic leader. Perhaps he was just a curious sort and she had never taken the time to notice before.

  “No matter,” Baas answered after a time. He scanned the trees suspiciously. “Some spell of the Faey, I think.”

  Larren scoffed at that as he worked over a piece of dried venison. It was no secret that Baas was Rockbled. The Landkist of the Fork were not as overt in their power as the Embers, but they were impressive in their own right. Incredibly strong, tireless and blessed with natural resiliencies to weapons of the earth—most weapons—they might not be as offensively potent as the Landkist of the Emberfolk, but they were exceedingly difficult to kill.

  Of course, Linn had never seen those powers in action. Her mother had, but there had rarely been cause for Ember to fight against or alongside Rockbled in the decades since the early conflicts, no matter how many demons the World Apart sent into the Valley.

  Their makeshift camp fell into a silence that each of them worked to cover with the checking of gear, the washing of teeth and the pulling of strap and buckle. There was a grim mood about. In place of the shining sun that should have been greeting their backs through the filtering branches, they had woken to a pall hanging about the sky, which was punctuated by the echo of distant thunder.

  Linn was thankful that the twins had decided not to accompany them. Taei was fine enough, and certainly useful in a pinch, but she could do without Fihn, whose mood as often as not resembled the gray skies above. It was all about small victories in the Valley, and Linn would take them where she could find them.