“I know—
“No,” Ninyeva interrupted. “You know a small piece. You came upon a single Sentinel. There are more, and they have brought with them their Corrupted. Even last night, I saw things stirring in the Untamed Hills—great beasts being turned in the image of the Night Lords.”
“I don’t understand,” Iyana said. “If The Eastern Dark has come for us, why does he not send the whole of the World Apart? Why do it piecemeal?”
“The World Apart is a place of chaos,” Ninyeva said. “I do not even think a Sage is confident mining its stores. He sent true Night Lords, powerful generals, against his brother and our protector before you were born. I think the experience nearly killed him. Most of us thought it had. The Sentinels are a virus, incredibly dangerous but not so powerful on their own to draw the notice of the other Sages. The war he makes on us now is one meant to be made in private.”
“It felt powerful enough,” Kole said, shivering despite his warmth.
“Yes,” Ninyeva said. “Now you know what to expect. The Corrupted will not be nearly as potent as their masters, but you need to avoid conflict where you can. You need to make for the peaks and find the source. It lies beneath a red roof, the one I have shown you.”
“How?” Kole asked. “How do you know this?”
“I have seen it,” Ninyeva said, and even she looked to waver for a moment, her eyes glazing over. She cleared them and refocused. “I do not pretend to have all the answers, Kole. I only know that we will not endure this flood unless we stop the source, and the source is nowhere near here.”
“I want to know how Reyna has been having these dreams,” Tu’Ren broke in.
Ninyeva’s attention splintered and something in the room went with it. Iyana seemed to come back to herself. She stopped her swaying and blinked sharply.
“What you felt when the great ape looked into your eyes and you into his,” Ninyeva said, looking to Kole. “Did you feel the same when the Sentinel locked you in its gaze?”
Kole nodded.
Ninyeva turned her eyes back to Tu’Ren.
“We know that our King of Ember, together with the White Crest, attempted to bring down our enemy in the east,” she said. “We know that he failed, but knowing how powerful he was—a Landkist capable of striking a bargain with one Sage and challenging another—I can guess he made an impression.”
Kole swallowed, feeling suddenly quite sick.
“You think he has designs on Kole in particular?” Iyana asked. “What of Tu’Ren, or Larren, or the Embers of Hearth?”
“I do not know,” she said, and she looked to be telling the truth of it. It was a truth that bothered her greatly. Her eyes hardened. “You have long felt that the Valley was more prison than refuge, Kole. I do not know if that is the case, but given what I’ve seen lately, and what comes against us now, I cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that we’ve been right where he wanted the whole time. I think it’s time we showed him why we are not to be trifled with.”
“And what of the White Crest?” Tu’Ren asked.
“I don’t know,” Ninyeva said. “I awoke something in the Between. In some way, I think it may have been the catalyst for the darkness that assails us now, though it was always coming. But these are not weapons of his, no matter where you think his allegiance rests or rested.”
She looked to Kole as she finished and looked as if she wanted to say more. After a struggle, she did.
“I won’t send anyone else on a fool’s quest to find a guardian long since dead,” she said, swallowing after the words had been said.
And there it was, Kole’s world come crashing down, and the apparent source sitting right before him. His mother had not struck out for the peaks those years ago of her own accord. Ninyeva had played some part, however great or small.
Kole felt his blood go hot, but he worked to cool it. He reminded himself what he remembered of his mother, and more so what others had told him since. She had been headstrong to a fault, making Linn Ve’Ran look like a conformist by comparison. Any choice she made, she made herself. Still, it was a bitter pill to swallow, but one that had no doubt taken courage for Ninyeva to admit.
“I made a choice, Kole,” she said. “A choice based on things I believed and on things I wanted to believe. Only take care that, whatever you find in the north, you do not make the same mistakes. It won’t always be you who pays for it.”
Ninyeva swept her gaze to encompass all in the room.
“You are all children of the Valley,” she said, eyes misting over. “Even you, Kadeh.” Tu’Ren nodded with a blush. “Landkist or not, the fire within our people has never burned brighter. I see now the folly of the King of Ember: it was fear that drove us out of the deserts, and it is fear that has kept us here.”
She looked to Kole and Iyana.
“You are children raised in a war against the dark,” she said. “I am sorry for that, but it has prepared you to be the stewards of your own destiny, and that of your people.”
After a time, Kole looked up.
“Perhaps if our noble heroes have charged themselves with saving the Valley in my stead, I’ll have to resign myself to saving them.”
Hearth was built on the lone hill that rested on the great plains of the Valley. White stones jutted up from the dark soil to form a patchwork with the green grass and silver-blue streams that snaked through it. The biggest stone of all rose up in a sheer cliff and formed most of the northern section of the city’s walls, the rest having been built out from it.
The Rivermen had taken to calling it ‘Ant Hill’ soon after the first conflicts. For a long time, the Emberfolk had assumed the name derived from the settlement’s physical structure: the streets rose onto a great crest before dipping back down into the Red Bowl at the center, which formed the Valley’s main market. All in all, it was an easy comparison to make. But that was not the reason for the name.
Instead, they had named Hearth so after its inhabitants: though smaller and seemingly weaker than the great warriors along the Fork, the Emberfolk were akin to a swarm when agitated. The Rivermen had learned that lesson hard.
Talmir Caru used to despise the name and all it represented. Now, having risen in Hearth’s ranks from courier all the way to Captain and commander, he thought it fit. He thought of Hearth as a nest, one to be defended and one that should not be kicked lightly.
With the backing of Hearth’s three Ember Keepers, Talmir had the white walls and the adjoining cliffs manned, braziers lit and oil stocked and boiling before the first line of dark men began scrabbling up the white rocks at the base. Garos Balsheer, arguably the most powerful Ember in the Valley—the folk of Last Lake being the arguers—took the front gate, while Misha Ve’Gah commanded the cliffs to the north and Creyath Mit’Ahn stood with Talmir along the South Bend.
“These are not Dark Kind,” Creyath said, shaking Talmir from his private reverie.
“No,” Talmir said, clearing his throat. “But the flames still put a scare in them nonetheless.”
Creyath nodded, peering over the walls at the thick line of blackened char at the base. It should have made Talmir feel better that these dark men could no more readily threaten his walls than the formless creatures of nightmare that harried them throughout the Dark Months. But then he caught sight of that red-eyed commander, gaze unwavering across the field, and his surety evaporated.
“I want an arrow through that one’s skull.”
Creyath, ever the literal one, sighted the distant figure through the gloom, but shook his head as he lowered his bow.
“I don’t understand,” Talmir said.
“What?”
“Any of this.”
He turned to Creyath, whose eyes were the burnt orange of sunset.
“Before word came up from the Lake last week, you were the only one in the Valley who had slain a Night Lord,” Talmir said.
“I was also the only one to come upon one. Besides, those tales are exaggerated. I don’t know what I fought. It is
dark in the Deep Lands, and dark things wander there.”
Creyath considered the Captain curiously.
“Why do you bring this up?”
“I remember you saying the thing that struck you most about it was the eyes,” Talmir said, and a shadow passed over Creyath’s already-swarthy features.
“Red like rubies,” the Ember said. “Or blood. But it was not the color, Captain. It was how they moved, the way they considered. They were not the eyes of a beast, and they watched after the deed had been done.”
“At the time, you believed them to belong to another,” Talmir said and Creyath nodded, looking across the field toward the distant commander, who stood unmoving in the drizzle.
“The tales from the desert claim that the Eastern Dark unleashed greater powers from the World Apart, Night Lords and Sentinels, the latter of which could turn their victims. What’s come against us now has nothing to do with the Dark Months or rifts between worlds. This army was sent, and I think we know who sent it.”
“He lives,” Creyath said, as if it had never been in doubt.
“Did the Runners go out?” Talmir asked, changing the subject.
“To Lake and River,” Creyath said. “They took the path beneath the cliffs.”
“If a force this large is already at the fields, I hate to think how our friends at the Fork have fared.”
“Or the Scattered Villages,” Creyath put in. “Perhaps the Faey managed to divert them.”
“Most of the villages are in the woods to the far west,” Talmir said. “Hopefully none besides that foolish old man and his daughter were out on the roads so early in the season.”
The sickening thought that the army scraping at the base of their walls could be their own threatened bile.
“Have any of your men got a close look at them?”
“They appear to be foreigners,” Creyath said, answering the unspoken question.
There was a lull in the conversation that matched the slowed press of the army, which had sent one wave to be doused in oil and flame, the next now milling about just out of bowshot. Talmir used the silence to take stock of his soldiers. He did not look at them, meeting eyes and sharing nods. Instead, he listened.
There were light conversations among pairs, triples and small groups. The subject could be easily guessed at, but it was the tone Talmir was after, and he sensed no panic therein. That was good. He heard Garos’s booming voice echo down from the main gate, and even thought he heard the higher-pitched shouts of Ve’Gah carrying on the wind down from the white cliffs.
Still, Talmir was a realist—some would label him a pessimist—and the fact that the army arrayed before them had affected the watchful hunger of jackals had him concerned. They were not reckless like the usual Dark Kind. They were mindless, but there was a mind behind them.
“I think I’ll go relieve myself before these man-beasts give it another go,” Talmir said. “Think they’ll give it another go?”
The question was rhetorical; of course they would, but Creyath shared his slow nod regardless.
Just as Talmir was cresting the top of the stairs, the blaring sound of horns nearly knocked the piss out of him then and there. He caught himself, spun and rushed back to his place. The air was already buzzing with Creyath’s building heat, his brazier glowing as the Ember drank its contents in through his palm.
“What is it?” Talmir asked, eyes straining in the dusk—or was it morning? The storm clouds had redoubled, making the passage of the low sun difficult to judge. “My eyes are not as sharp as yours.”
“You are younger than I, Talmir Caru,” the Ember said. “Look beyond your red man. Look to the trees.”
Talmir did, and though his eyes told him otherwise, what he saw he did not quite believe. It started as a vibration that shook the canopy like the surface of a lake. The dark green foliage became a blur of motion, branch and trunk joining leaf in the foreboding dance. He heard cracks split the sky, but saw no streaks of light to mark the thunder. There were sounds of great things moving in the forest.
“They may not have gone after the villagers or the Faey,” Talmir said, realization dawning. “But there are some big things hiding in the Untamed Hills.”
“Let us hope they are all equally flammable,” Creyath said, looking much more like predator than prey in that moment. And when Talmir saw the first of the beasts break from the trees, he was glad he had a few of his own along the wall.
There were only a handful, but they ranged from bear-like to serpentine, and they were very, very large—an affectation of the Night Lords that had challenged the White Crest in the passes a generation ago, if not the real thing.
“You take the call here,” Talmir said. His tone was even, no hint of the nerves writhing just beneath the surface.
Talmir moved along the wall, the soldiers parting to let him pass. The mood had changed, but he knew they would stand and fight no matter the circumstances. The Valley that was supposed to be their refuge had become something else entire; as a result, it was often the youngest among his men and women that displayed the most grit. It was a sad truth, but one he welcomed now.
Questions spun in his mind, and no matter the form they took, the core was the same, tying them to a single word that echoed like a lone piece of sanity in a world gone mad.
Why?
No matter the answer, the question remained. The dark was here, and it had to be stopped. Talmir had done it before. He and his Embers, and the men and women they led. All had played as large a role in stopping the extinction of their people as the great white walls themselves. Still, some part of him knew this time was different, that this was not just an attack, but a mission whose purpose was singular.
Talmir skirted the edge of the battlements as he walked, dodging archers and couriers alike. Once, he nearly tripped and took the two-story drop into the courtyard below. This caused him to break a rule he usually kept to, and that was not to look at the yolk in the nest he protected. But he saw. He saw faces young and old drawn tight with worry. They stood in the streets and milled in the doorways, caught between tasks as the horns sounded once again.
They were looking at him.
“Caru! What are you doing this close to my gate?”
A great shadow passed over Talmir, only this one leaked warmth in place of terror. Garos Balsheer’s stern features broke into an easy smile as he pulled the Captain away from the edge.
“Thought the folk down here could use a real commander,” Talmir said, earning a punch on the shoulder that promised to bruise despite the armor he wore.
“Wonder where these things’ve come from,” Garos said as they stared out over the oncoming horde.
“Does it matter?” Talmir asked bitterly.
Garos looked at him for a spell and then laughed full-bellied. He took to shouting his orders and the men and women around him shaped up, faces hardening.
There had been a time not so long ago when Garos’s mocking demeanor had been genuine. The First Keeper did not like being led by an upstart, especially one that was not Landkist. Somewhere along the way, that had changed. It was subtle enough that it had taken years for Talmir to notice, and even longer before he registered how much it mattered to him.
“The situation,” Talmir said, and Garos made a great show of clearing his throat. The display sent ripples of stifled laughed throughout the assembled soldiers. It was the way Garos led, and Talmir had long ago stopped interfering.
“My lads and I’ve got this gate covered,” he said. “Literally, actually. There’s enough pitch in the gap there to fry the whole army, if they make for it. As for the cliffs, Ve’Gah and her man Dakken have it. Not many of the critters hanging around the north. No way in that they can see, so the White Guard have sent most of their own south along the bend to bolster our ranks. I assume the straight man has the South Bend?” He looked to Talmir, who nodded. “Splendid.”
“It will have to do.”
“It always does,” Garos boome
d, and Talmir saw the young soldiers—some of the boys too young to shave, the girls too young to have been kissed—glancing at the powerful Ember from beneath lidded helms. They searched for a source of strength, though they were all killers in their own right.
“I want all three Embers at their braziers at all times.”
“Radius formation, eh?”
“Yes.”
“That leaves you to cover the gaps,” Garos said, trying to keep the doubt from showing in his tone.
Talmir smirked, loosening his father’s sword in its scabbard. He turned away from Garos and made for the gap between the First and Second Keepers along the South Bend. Creyath would stay by his post, he knew, but he knew just as well that Garos would abandon his if it meant saving the lives of his soldiers. Garos’s brazier had not been giving off much heat, which meant the lion’s share was already coursing through the Ember’s veins. Talmir almost felt sorry for whichever of the great beasts made for the gate.
“Captain!”
Talmir spun. He saw Garos standing on the edge of the gate, hands braced on the parapets. A banner woman was pointing to the southwest, where the titans approached at a run. Abominations and approximations of ape, boar and bear rushed forward, pounding the earth and sending the white stones in the fields flying like hailstones, glowing eyes throwing red trails. The shadows at their feet lurched forward and broke into a trot that soon became a sprint, and a hush descended on the assembled soldiers.
“Fires!” Talmir screamed, iron in his voice. “Light and let fly!” And the arrows lit the sky like tiny comets streaking beneath black clouds.
None here had been born in the heart of the windswept deserts of the north. None here had felt the sand sting their eyes and backs, the elements lashing like whips against hides tough as horned runners. These were Valley children, soft and green. But there was fire in their blood, and it shined brightest when things from the night approached.
Swords and spears raised, strings pulled taught on bows, banners slapped in the violent winds and a single clear note rang out from the heart of the Valley, from Hearth. It was a note that rose on the beating of stubborn wills.
Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1) Page 11
