Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1)

by Steven Kelliher

  Talmir waited for him to continue. He had only met Sarise A’zu in passing, but her reputation was well earned. When the Dark Kind had first come spilling into the Valley in force, hers was one of the brightest flames holding them back.

  “I think,” Karin continued, “I think something changed in Kole after she died. Something changed in all of our children. They’ve grown up in war.”

  Talmir could not help but glance at the rushing soldiers under his command, reminded once again how much their stern visages clashed with the soft skin of youth.

  “They want something more,” Karin said. “And they want to take it for themselves, even if it means challenging the Sages. Sometimes I think Kole and his own would take on the legions of the World Apart if they could.”

  “They may yet get the opportunity,” Talmir said with a bitter laugh. “This has to be something close.”

  Karin regarded him, eyes clearing as the haze of memory passed like a spirit.

  “The group you speak of must have left shortly after I did.”

  “By accounts, Larren Holspahr leads them.”

  “No,” Karin challenged, shaking his head slowly, brows knitting together. “No, Holspahr leads in name only. Kole may have inherited something like his mother’s fire, but Linn Ve’Ran is the closest thing I’ve seen to her will.”

  “And what of us?” Talmir asked, as much to the swirling gray skies as to the First Runner. “Do we merely sit idle, waiting for our roving band of heroes to bring us the head of one Sage or another and end this blight?”

  “There is only one who flirts with the power of the World Apart.”

  “Yes,” Talmir said. “I know. And it’s one they have no hope of defeating. If he’s truly come for us in earnest, then our only hope is to endure.”

  “Endure,” Karin mouthed.

  The silence had no space to settle this time, as a horn sounded, ripping Talmir from his contemplations and sending icy shards through his blood. They were completely besieged and in the direst of straights. What could possibly be cause for alarm? Could Tu’Ren have come? What of the Rivermen and their Rockbled, or perhaps the Faey?

  The horn sounded again as he made his way up the stairs, Karin passing him in two leaping strides. The Captain’s heart was gripped by a sickening combination of dread horror and that more deadly poison: hope. He reached the gate panting and stopped the young lad from putting horn to lips for a third blow. The Dark Kind scrambled up the walls with renewed vigor, the Corrupted souls opening their black maws in those noiseless wails as the clear, echoing notes whipped them into a frenzy.

  “What is it, son?” he shouted at the startled scout. “We’re having a hard enough time as it is. What could possibly—

  “Oh.”

  At first, it looked like a firefly, dancing and buzzing at the edges of a meadow with darkness all around. There were two lights lashing back and forth in sharp arcs, the Dark Kind parting before them before closing back in behind like whirlpools.

  “What is it?” Talmir asked, knowing the answer even as he asked.

  “Embers,” Karin said. “Embers in the fields.”

  The ice settled in thick around Talmir’s heart. There were Embers in the fields. And he could not open the gate.

  If Kole was the prow of the ship then the twins were his sails, Fihn’s silver blade the lightning strikes amidst Taei’s red storm. Kole’s twin Everwood blades were a single, whirling thing. He parted the sea of Dark Kind and left the remnants to the allies at his back like flotsam.

  Taei and Fihn Kane moved as if in a shared trance, while Shifa was Kole’s constant shadow, the only one not seeking to part his head from his shoulders. When he began to slow, his blades drawing much of his strength, the twins bore him up in their wake, Taei’s flames augmenting his own. They came to a shallow depression in the middle of the field, a trench formed by a dry riverbed, and when they came up on the other side, the twins were in the lead. Kole turned to form the rear guard.

  He dared any of the shadow men to make a try for him. Many did.

  They splashed into one of the myriad shallow streams and it almost ended there. Taei lost his footing, his blade going out as he fell in a torrent of foam and steam. Fihn reached in to pull him out, cursing all the while, and Kole put his flames into a spirited defense, his legs burning, hands working in a violent blur.

  They came up on the other side of the trench and although Taei managed to get his blade going again, it was clear that he was tiring. Shifa was the only one whose pace never slowed.

  A horn sounded up ahead. It was a bright, clear note that clashed with the permanence of the ruddy night. It sounded again, and Kole spared a glance. Through the hazy blur of his blades he glimpsed the white shell, silver-tipped spears glittering on the battlements and red-roofed buildings cloistered in their nest. He saw the great black gate that stood stark and knew it could not be opened to them.

  Another note sounded, but this one was a yelp of pain. Kole spun to see Taei clutching his side. Blood flowed freely, splashing and bubbling on the torn turf. Fihn stood over him as he dropped to one knee, silver blade going up like a crescent moon.

  “Down!” Kole screamed. “Down!”

  Fihn lost her sword and clutched her brother in the chaos. Kole shot toward them, his blades sending great arcs of flame out that burned black flesh like birch. The scar Linn Ve’Ran had left him burned on his cheek, and the pain drove him on, his vision blurring red and indistinct. His veins bulged and formed ridges along his arms and neck, the flames dancing along his black blades turning from orange to deep red flecked with crackling blue. The fire spread to his hands and curled around his elbows as he fought.

  Some distant part of him heard Fihn crying out, her shielding of Taei changing hands as the wounded Ember wrapped her up and turned away from Kole’s whirlwind. They cowered there before an elemental, and Kole later thought he heard the laughter from his dream. He thought it might have been his own. He tore through the Dark Kind and through the innocent flesh of the Corrupted like a tornado through a fallow mire.

  His head swam as he heard the twins retreat at his back and he was dimly aware of the sound Shifa’s claws made on the timber and chains as the gate began its protesting ascent. The smoke spread but would not clear, the flames eating hungrily on the field of corpses he’d made. He thought the black-pitted eyes beyond stared at him with something approximating fear, and the telltale glint of the Sentinels’ blood reds faded back into the distant trees when he chanced to look their way.

  Hooves clattered and clomped on the cobbles within and squat steeds, brown and white, issued forth from the city. The twins were pulled up, Fihn sobbing silently as Taei cooed, and Kole turned his back on the black tide and let the flames go out as he passed under the arch.

  The gate shut behind him with a strange echo.

  “He has been waylaid at Hearth.”

  Rusul said it and then took a long drag on her bone pipe, some product of a horned runner of the Untamed Hills. She held it in for a spell before releasing the milky vapor in a billowing plume.

  Ninyeva wrinkled her nose. She was well versed in pungent odors and so she did not complain, but the Seers and the Faeykin produced their sight with contrasting methodologies and that was doubly true for the ingredients they used.

  The Faey Mother stood in the dimly lit common room Rusul shared with her sisters in Eastlake. Outside, the establishment was a strange tangle of ramshackle brick and mortar. Inside, what some might describe as cozy, others would consider stuffy bordering on stale. The floorboards were bent and sloping and the walls peeling due to the constant presence of moist vapor. Worst of all, the ceiling was low and no fresh air snaked its way in from stack or pane.

  More so than the confines, however, it was the underlying smell that insulted Ninyeva. It was faint, but deep and pervading, seeping into everything like a rot. It was the smell of old blood and it made her want to scrub her pores.

  “Apologies,” Rusul said, ti
pping the pipe and spilling the ashes into a ceramic bowl. “I need something to settle.”

  Ninyeva raised a corner of her mouth and nodded.

  “You don’t seem surprised about Reyna’s whereabouts.”

  “It’s been a month full of surprises. Each is more mundane than the last.”

  Rusul searched her face and shrugged.

  “Reyna’s location may not be surprising,” Rusul said, setting her pipe down, “but the manner of his arrival was … something.”

  “Something.”

  “Indeed.”

  It was clear that Rusul was trying to gauge how much Ninyeva knew, which—at least as far as scrying was concerned—was very little. The Faeykin could travel the roads of the Between. They were not limited by time or space, but the desert Seers like Rusul and her sisters had an edge where it concerned seeing as most understood it.

  “The Seers of the Sand—Oracles, as they used to be known—have long held themselves apart from mortal affairs, as you know,” Rusul said.

  “You are mortal, and you are a far cry from the Oracles of old,” Ninyeva clipped as she settled down on the dusky carpet.

  Rusul’s lips formed a tight line.

  “What have you to tell me?” Ninyeva asked without pretense. “What was the manner of Kole’s arrival to Hearth?”

  “My words have relevance,” Rusul said without humor. Ninyeva motioned for her to continue.

  “The Oracles were wiped out in the wake of an Ember King’s blind rage,” Rusul said, wincing at the imagined memory. “King Kaizul. Do you remember why he did this?”

  “His son Mena’Tch visited the Oracles,” Ninyeva droned. “They told him that no Ember living or yet to live would possess his power—no Landkist in the wider world, for that matter.”

  “And in exchange for their prophecy, what did they ask?”

  “For Mena’Tch to kill the Sages. Every one. It did not go well for him.”

  “But not because of the Sages,” Rusul said, leaning forward. “He never got his opportunity to test himself against them before his father, the king, came for him.”

  “Some believe that. Others believe he failed in his first attempt, falling to the Sage of Balon Rael.”

  “The latter is the popular telling,” Rusul said. “Something passed down from those who believe in the power, if not the goodness of the Sages. The former is the truth. It was Mena’Tch’s wife who betrayed his plans to the King of Ember. To save his people the retribution of the Sages, Kaizul committed a grave sin. After killing his son in his sleep, he took out his anger on the Oracles, my forebears.”

  “I fail to see the relevance,” Ninyeva said. The crows were more verbose than their namesake. Ninyeva was not a patient woman; she merely played one when she wanted to.

  “There are any number of ways to find relevance. For instance, the Oracles saw their deaths in the flames, so they hid away their young.”

  “A line from which you and yours claim to descend.”

  “That was the smaller of Kaizul’s mistakes,” Rusul said, ignoring the barb.

  “The greater was in eliminating a power capable of challenging the Sages, as no Ember Keeper was before or has been after.”

  “Our own King of Ember was more formidable than you know,” Ninyeva said, bristling.

  “And he fell to the Eastern Dark.”

  Ninyeva grumbled, but it was the truth.

  “The Seers of this Valley have long subscribed to the notion that the White Crest was an exception among his kind,” Rusul said, her eyes taking on a glazed quality. “Now I wonder.”

  It was a surprising admission.

  “And your sisters?” Ninyeva asked and Rusul’s brows turned up.

  “Do you see them present?”

  Ninyeva settled back and the two eyed each other with something approaching respect.

  “I know I’ve been rambling,” Rusul said, and her seeming vulnerability made Ninyeva at once suspicious and touched. She searched out the feelings, her eyes glowing faintly, and found not a hint of deception therein. “I only wished to preface the scene we witnessed with the information I felt most pertinent.”

  “You feel the Legend of Mena’Tch is a pertinent story to Kole’s having arrived at Hearth?” Ninyeva asked, eyes widening.

  For all her faults, Rusul was a strong woman. Seeing her in such a compromised state was unsettling. Ninyeva had not noticed how haggard she looked upon entering. Now, it was impossible not to see.

  “What did you see, Rusul?” she asked. She almost wanted to reach out, but refrained.

  “I do not know what Mena’Tch looked like,” Rusul said, “but I now think I know what power he possessed. I saw it in the fields of Hearth, in one of our own. I saw it in Kole Reyna.”

  “Tell me,” Ninyeva whispered, images from her own travels in the Between playing out in her mind’s eye.

  “We saw much. My sisters are still recovering. We saw the dark army—yes, an army, not the faceless and formless packs—surrounding the walls of Hearth. We saw the broken husks and homes of the Rivermen along the Fork, but no bodies. We saw Night Lords or something like them sheltering in the trees and sneaking among reeds in the swamps near the Deep Lands. We could not penetrate the peaks with our sight, and just when we were about to withdraw …”

  She hesitated.

  “Yes? Go on.”

  Rusul looked up, eyes wide.

  “We thought it was the sun suddenly returned, breaking through the black clouds. It was that bright. It was him. It was Kole Reyna, fighting his way through the Dark Kind as if they were dried weeds to be burned out. Virena thought it was Mena’Tch himself, or the King of Ember returned. But it was Reyna.”

  An image of Sarise A’zu.

  Had it been concern for her people that had driven her to the peaks in search of the White Crest those years ago? Or had it been something in her blood? Something of prophecy. Ninyeva saw much of her in Kole, much more than his father Karin. She remembered that vision in the rain. She remembered the shadows that had come against her, and how long she had stood. She remembered thinking the flames had been augmented by the viewing glass of the Between, but now she wondered.

  And another image sprang into her mind, one from the same night. When she had gone to Karin, Kole had been overtaken by thrashing nightmares, turning his entire bedroom into an approximation of Towles’ Steam House. She had never seen anything like it.

  “Bloodlines do not guide the awakening of Landkist,” Ninyeva said, trying to convince herself as much as Rusul. “Not in these lands or any other. Not in the desert.”

  Rusul merely relit her pipe, her decorum lost in the stress of their exchange and the strain of reliving her travels.

  “Do you think this a bad thing?” Ninyeva asked, surprised at the question. “This power within Kole?”

  “He’s on our side,” Rusul said with a shivering shrug. She breathed the pipe weed in deeply and exhaled threw her nostrils, the tendrils forming a fading dress around her crossed legs.

  “But …”

  “For a long time,” Rusul said with a sigh, “we looked to the White Crest as an exception among his kind. Perhaps he was. Either way, he was a power we could look to in the absence of our king. We have powerful Embers, more powerful than any of the Landkist in the Valley, but their Everwood blades would be pale candles to the Eastern Dark. Perhaps Kole could challenge him. But I cannot pretend that what I saw was a comforting thing. I don’t think power like that is meant to bring comfort.”

  “Only change,” Ninyeva said, nodding.

  “You are hiding something from me,” Rusul said, a bit of the familiar ice returning. “What is it?”

  “My own sight works much differently than yours,” Ninyeva said, choosing her words carefully. “I see shadows half-formed out of place and time. It takes time to separate the superfluous from the true.”

  She rose and brushed the lint from her robes.

  “There is a power in the north,” Ninyeva said
. “That I know, but I am not ready to say it is our enemy returned. At least, not all of him. Now,” she continued, cutting off further inquiry, “you say you saw much. Did you see Holspahr and the others?”

  “We could not be expected to scan the woods themselves. Wherever they are, they’re keeping quiet. And wherever they are, let’s hope they keep it that way. None in that company has the power to stand up to a Sage, assuming it is one of the Six come against us.”

  Ninyeva nodded and turned for the door. The air outside was cool and fresh, though ozone still tickled the tip of her nose, the threat of storm returning.

  There had been a heavy blackness—a rushing that enveloped her completely. It dragged her down and guided her over jagged spurs and smooth knobs, which tore at her skin and clothes and set her muscles and bones to ring. She was acutely aware of the air that remained in her lungs and guarded it like a jealous drake.

  The water dragged her down into the guts of the mountains, where it no doubt thought to kill her. The pain was blinding as the air burst out of her of its own accord, and the panic gave way to a dreamy sort of dying. Her head swam. Linn had never surrendered, but she considered it then.

  She felt open air and gulped hungrily before the river tossed her unceremoniously into the guts of some primordial stomach carved from long-ago liquid fire. This time, the current slowed, and her feet touched down on rock and silt. She rocketed up and broke the surface, gasping and crying, and it felt like a second birth.

  Linn could see, and that surprised her. Treading weakly at the surface, tired legs churning beneath her, she saw dim shafts of filtered light spilling in from a place out of sight. Something brushed against her arm and she yelled out before she recognized the creature to be none other than Jenk floating facedown in the black water. She worked to turn him over, but the river was not done with them and the current was picking up again, purchase impossible to find.

  The lake narrowed ahead and it looked like blown glass dipping down as the current ate hungrily, forming small eddies and hills in the glittering obsidian surface. With a heave, Linn turned Jenk over, his light hair falling in tangles around a pale face, and together they rode the growing swells helpless and hapless. She pumped her legs furiously, but white caps formed on the water now, the river’s strength redoubling as hers faded.