The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  He saw it in the way Creyath swallowed as he regarded the Sage. The Ember had not killed a Night Lord in the Deep Lands. Perhaps a remnant of their magic—an echo of that fateful clash—but the hearts Linn Ve’Ran had pierced in the heart of a red-topped keep had been evidence enough of their ending. Theirs was a power even the Sages feared.

  “A Night Lord,” Ceth said, surprising Talmir. The northern Landkist stepped in front of Talmir and stood before Pevah. He did not wear a look like challenge, but rather one made of earnest and forbidding question, and a calm that did not fit. “That is what lies buried? A Night Lord from the World Apart, like those from the stories?”

  Pevah only nodded, and Talmir thought the Sage had to work to suppress the shiver that threatened his bones. Perhaps he was only projecting his own fears.

  “The White Crest defeated three,” Ceth said. “The Sage of the Southern Valley.”

  Another nod with a tilt. “He survived,” Pevah said. “But—”

  “He took their hearts for safekeeping,” Iyana put in. “He thought to use their power to stave off the Eastern Dark.”

  “That,” Pevah said, “or to learn something of the ways of their own realm so that he might survive its coming.”

  Talmir shook his head and squeezed his eyes tightly for a moment, willing the sudden throbbing at his temples to subside. It only got worse.

  “But there was a fourth,” Karin said. “And you couldn’t kill it.”

  “No.” The Sage said it without a hint of the regret Talmir might have expected. “The Eastern Dark knew I had been party to the plot.”

  “What plot?” Talmir asked.

  “The plot that sent your forebears south, along with a score of Embers—the most potent of the World’s Landkist. No doubt your tales tell as much.”

  “No doubt the tales in all Lands tell of their own champions,” Creyath said, as if the implication that he was greatest of a kind who stood well above common man was more a threat than a promise.

  “No doubt,” Pevah said. “And no doubt they are mistaken. Though,” he turned those red eyes on Ceth, “we cannot say for sure that we know all of the secrets the land keeps.” He turned back to Creyath. “And no doubt you have seen the range of power your kind is capable of—or not. The presence of power does not signify its mastery. But make no mistake: fire burns brightest.”

  “What of it?” Iyana asked, showing the exasperation Talmir was beginning to feel anew. “What of the Night Lords? What of the fourth?”

  Pevah swallowed. His face glistened with sweat that made him look sickly—even afraid. He reminded Talmir of one of the desert foxes, panicked and skittish, ready to flee or to bite at a moment’s notice.

  “The greatest among those who came through,” he said. “Their leader. Their captain. I do not say it because I could not lay him low. I say it because it is the truth. It is the burden that has kept me a slave to this land—to this charge—for as long as he has raged in the place I’ve kept him. He is … it is awe and death made whole.”

  He shook his head again, as if he wished to shake the past and all it held. “Would that I could have come to that Valley of yours,” he said. “Would that I could have tracked down T’Alon Rane and turned him back, or else put him down from the path he’d set himself on. More likely he’d have done it to me, first.” He turned to Ceth and reached out toward the tall, fair-haired warrior, who carried no weapons but for himself. He stopped short, his hand replete with long fingers falling to his side like a chain with a weight on the end. “Would that I could have been atop those cliffs when the Twins came with their dark designs, or noticed the Blood Seers and the entrails they cast, sheltered the children of the tribes before their numbers swelled and ours dwindled.”

  He exhaled—a long and mournful sound. Talmir half-expected him to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness. Instead, he clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. There was an odd quickening of Talmir’s own breath. He felt light and airy, his heart racing until the old man steadied himself and the time around him.

  “The Eastern Dark’s power lies in believing he is right,” Pevah said. “It lies in the cleverness of a straight and unbending will. He has me trapped here, away from his meddling. Away from his war. The Red Waste, now nothing more than a keeper of an unwilling prisoner, untamable. Perhaps unkillable.”

  “Everything can be killed,” Ceth said. He looked to Creyath, to Iyana and Karin. He turned to Talmir and to Ket, to Jes and Mial. He stared a challenge at the blue eyes and gray sashes, and at the brown and red. “We will never be free of it,” he said. He turned back to Pevah, dropping his voice to take on a sympathy Talmir would not have thought him capable of. “But it will be free of us. Won’t it, Pevah? It will be free.”

  Pevah sighed, and it was a sound like giving in, or moving on. It was an answer to all the questions any in the twin companies could have. It was a condemnation and a promise.

  “You did not have me when you trapped the beast,” Ceth said.

  Pevah smiled, but Talmir thought it was a sorry thing. He felt a pang in his chest that reached the tips of the Bronze Star that hung there.

  “No,” Pevah said. “No, I did not.” He cast a longing look down at the tunnel as a sound like birds drifted, the children recovering from the horror of the night quicker than any of those who had sired them died defending them.

  None spoke. Instead, they watched Pevah as he turned back, and in the place of that aching, suffocating regret was now something like stone. Something like Iyana and the sister she had left in the east, and it was to her the Sage now looked.

  “The crones and their sorry charges will make for the Midnight Dunes,” he said, his voice taking on a growing purpose with each passing word. “They are fools, but perhaps not in the way I have thought them.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Talmir asked.

  “The power they seek will wipe them away like so much of the ash we stand amidst now,” he said. “They believe the truth of the Ember fire lies buried there, but it is nothing less than its opposite. It is hate and strength and wrath embodied. It is great in a way men and Landkist and even Sages can never be. Still,” he looked to Iyana, “perhaps there is more to their bloody songs than I have been willing to grant. I had attributed the weakening of the wards and the warnings of the foxes to my own slow failure. But perhaps they have found a tear and spread it wider—a weak link made weaker. Perhaps I have been blind, and the blood of our protectors has stained the tops of those great mounds like no horizon ever could.”

  “Madness is a difficult thing to parse,” Karin said. Pevah seemed to weigh his words as if they were of the utmost importance. He nodded once and then looked away.

  “They will get the war they wanted,” Pevah said, his face settling into the hardness Talmir had glimpsed before the haunting transformation had overtaken it the night before. He seemed at once to dread and long for the inevitability of the coming clash. In a way, Talmir could sympathize. “They will get their reckoning.” He looked to Ceth and to the others, his desert children, adopted though they might be. “It will be a night of endings, I think.”

  “We’ve had many such nights,” the blonde, fair-skinned woman, Martah, said. “Some very recent. It will be something new to choose a place and time for it.” She smiled, and it was infectious, the collective turning their grief and the anger it called up into a sharpened iron resting in slow-burning coals. Talmir could feel the heat of the rod and knew its dousing would make a blast to remember—a quick and sudden thing of violence and hissing.

  “You will go, then,” Talmir said as much as asked. “You will go to the west, to the Midnight Dunes. You will try to slay the beast.”

  A shadow passed over Pevah’s face that Talmir recognized as fear, quickly covered. He tried not to dwell on it.

  “Aye,” Ceth answered for him. He looked to Martah, and Talmir had the sudden impression that they were a pair in some way. Or had been. The man’s next words carried the fear of on
e they both protected. Of many. “The children,” he said, his gray-blue eyes holding Talmir as no Sage’s spell could. “Will you take them south?”

  Talmir swallowed as all eyes turned his way. He felt a hardening that reminded him of the worst times and the good things he had sometimes managed to make of them.

  “The World is a deadly place so long as the Sages’ War continues,” Talmir said. It stood to reason he excepted the Sage among them, but he left it unsaid. “We left our Valley for a reason.” Again, it was Iyana’s greens more than Karin’s deep browns or Creyath’s amber-golds that molded his thoughts into words to fit his intent. “They will be safest if you succeed, I think.”

  Ceth frowned, but Talmir cleared his throat to say more. He paused.

  Talmir felt the weight around his neck and wondered for the hundredth time why he continued to wear the thing. He turned and met the eyes of all in the caravan. They were tired but clear-eyed, thin but weathered, strong as he could have asked for and unafraid. But what he saw reflected in the eyes of the young and old alike was a want that filled him with a pride he hadn’t felt since he stood on the white walls of his home and shouted into the face of death alongside the glowing braziers and burning hearts of his people. The people he led. The Emberfolk, and he saw their like in the red sashes covering dark skin and in the piercing pale of the displaced warriors of the north. Theirs was a desire that had yet to be sated.

  “It seems to me—to us, I gather—that your war is just a part of the one we all face, or that we will face sooner or later,” Talmir said. “The war for the World, and the fight against its neighbor, whatever the cause.” He met Pevah’s eyes as he said it and thought of his true name. The Sage remained steady. His look was a confirmation.

  “We will join you,” Talmir said. “Call it a reckoning.”

  Talmir hadn’t consulted the rest of them before he uttered words that seemed fateful, but Iyana didn’t mind. As she considered the looks of those gathered—the browns and sunlit reds of the red-sashes, the sky blues and stormy grays of Ceth and his northerners, and the chestnut tans and sparkling yellows of her own company—she knew none of them did. As Talmir had said, the Emberfolk of the Valley had come to do something. That something was more than killing and dying in the caves beneath the sands, than watching their hosts battle to save some semblance of a short-lived future for their young.

  She hadn’t considered the one feeling that seeped into the potent mix that had welled in her chest since the fight. She hadn’t been able to put a name to it, but now she thought she could: it was need that drove her, and she saw it reflected in the eyes she caught and that caught hers, but most of all she felt it in the stolid bearings and tilted chins, the clenched fists and silent cloisters. It was the need to act and to be reacted to.

  Iyana smiled. Captain Talmir had been right, as he often was when he chanced to give voice to the words behind his heart rather than those born of duty or position—the habit of command. It felt like a reckoning, and though Iyana knew such a thing rode dark paths to dark ends, she thought they had a few bright stars along to light the way.

  No commands had to be uttered. The folk who had made this place their grudging home moved with a purpose the Emberfolk mirrored. Ket, Jes, Mial and the warriors of the caravan bent to their tasks, checking gear and stowing it in equal measure, polishing anything that glowed until it shone like the white crystal pillar that watched from its not-too-distance place across the way. Creyath took the winding stair, either to check on the horses or to replenish his stores in the heart of the brightest brazier any Ember had known. Talmir spoke to Pevah and to Ceth, to Karin, who spoke back, defining the where and when, solidifying the why.

  But Iyana felt a pull that brought back the pang she had left behind during the Sage’s explanation. She followed it along the airy corridor until she came to the smooth stone door she now knew was as much the work of some long-ago molten river as the winds that cooled them from above.

  Sounds of scraping, grunting and clanging followed her, the company sounding larger than it was, but as she entered the small, rounded chamber with its single shaft of lonely light, she heard the twitter of birds.

  The children quieted as she entered, and Iyana swallowed as she noted the dark stains in the doorway beneath her feet. They no longer huddled, but rather moved about in clutches, triples and pairs, while Sen sat against the far wall, watching the motes of dust swirl in the center as those he had protected kept as far from him as possible.

  “Children,” Iyana said, her voice echoing much louder than she would’ve thought. They froze, their sharp and lilting voices stilling in their throats as they looked to her as if she were a harbinger. “You don’t have to stay in here any longer,” she said.

  They looked from her to one another, and a small, dark boy with hair that matched Creyath’s charger stepped forward. His voice was the sound of slate scraping. It reminded her of Jakub, the brave youth of Hearth Captain Talmir had named Runner.

  “They won’t come back?” he asked, suspicion evident. He pointed at the dark splotches by the door behind her and Iyana saw Sen wince.

  Iyana shook her head, but found the words slow in coming.

  “No,” she said after a time and another dry swallow. “No. I don’t think they will. But …” she paused, looking about. She half-expected some of their parents to filter in, but it seemed they were taking their time in saying goodbye, or else were busy arguing over who would stay and who would go.

  “You’re leaving,” he said. It didn’t sound like an accusation, but if Iyana felt it as a near thing, she knew those they called mother and father would as well.

  “We are,” she said.

  “All of you,” he said, nodding at the corridor behind her. “Even Pevah. You’re going out to fight them, aren’t you?”

  He sounded both excited and nervous at the prospect, and Iyana saw the younger children behind him switching their glances between him and her. They could have been huddled in the Long Hall, waiting out the latest attack, the screeches and screams of the Dark Kind battling the roar of the storm and winning out.

  But then, Iyana and hers had always had the Embers to protect them. They might’ve had the wall hounds and their minders. They had warriors as stout or stouter than any in the World. They had timber walls and flaming pitch, iron-tipped arrows and slender swords that rarely broke. But it was the Embers they looked to when the Dark Months came. It was they who burned brightest and fought longest: Larren Holspahr and Tu’Ren Kadeh and Taei Kane. It was Sarise A’zu before them and Kole Reyna, Jenk Ganmeer and Kaya Ferrahl after them.

  These children had only their own, and the weathered, steady hands and the weapons they brandished beneath their red desert sashes. They had their Sage and the tricks he seemed seldom to use, and they had the Landkist of the northern cliffs, with his strange ways and deadly poise. But they did not have their birthright, and Iyana felt a small sting of the great well of bitterness they must hold in the presence of Creyath Mit’Ahn.

  Iyana felt an anger at the World, then, and not its dark cousin, for a change. She felt it as a stronger and truer version of the one all Emberfolk of the Valley felt, thinking themselves abandoned. But though their Embers were few and growing fewer, they had new lights to guide them. Lights like Mother Ninyeva. Lights like her. Lights like Sen, who sat overcome by the darkness he’d allowed to be a part of him.

  She sighed, realizing she had begun to drift, and the children watched her, wary and tense.

  “Very nearly,” she said after a time. “Yes.” She felt a weight lift that could only come with truth laid plain and bare.

  She expected them to withdraw or to lash out—perhaps both in equal measure. She thought they might shout her down and spill into the tunnels and wider caverns, looking for familiar folk to blame. Instead, the boy nodded and set his face in a hard way that reminded her of the lighter folk with gray sashes, and she had a glimpse of how new peoples were made by taking from the old.
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  Iyana stepped away from the open doorway and swept a hand toward it. “Go to them, if you will. Do not let them take the guilt of leaving with them. They do this for you.”

  They moved hesitantly at first, but soon enough, they filtered out, their light chittering replaced by a stoic quiet that belied their tender age. When the last of them had gone, Iyana watched the shadows play along the opposite wall without the corridor. She shut her eyes and tensed, and then turned to find Sen regarding her with a look of green heartbreak.

  She moved to him and knelt before him, and he looked away in what could only be described as shame. She had not decided yet whether or not it fit and felt strange because of it.

  “One of the children died,” he said. He would not meet her eyes.

  Iyana knew it. They had all been atop the shelf that morning. She had seen the body out in the hall. It seemed Verna and Courlis had rushed him out, away from the press of pale flesh in the corridor, only to run into more waiting by the winding stair and the sloping shore.

  Sen swallowed. “He died with a single word on his lips. I heard him say it even as I seized on the beasts that once were men. He said it over and over until I knew its meaning and until I wished him to silence.” It sounded like a confession, and Iyana felt tears welling, the sorrow the day’s mix had eroded now coming back to the fore with speed.

  “‘Pevah,’ he said. ‘Pevah, Pevah.’ He said it even with a slashed throat. ‘Pevah…’”

  Iyana shook her head and wiped her eyes, her clothes filthy enough that the grief left behind a streak of clean on her sleeve.

  “I tried to turn for him, but I couldn’t let them go,” Sen said. “I began to cut their tethers—to rip them out at the roots. I heard the fighting in the hall. I shouted for Verna and Courlis to take him and run. They did, but the other children stayed behind. A good thing, all told. A good thing for them. A bad thing for those who listened to me.

  “Pevah,” Sen repeated, softly, like a child. A tear streaked down his face, painting its own crystalline pillar atop the powder-white. “You’d know what it means if you’d heard the way he said it.” He turned eyes that shone with anything but magic her way. “That wasn’t a boy calling for a Sage, or a god, though that’s the thing that answered.” Sen spat and Iyana recoiled at his bitterness. “The old man took them at the throats as I held them and cut their lives away. He followed the sounds that boy made. I assume you saw what he became?” Iyana nodded quickly and Sen continued. “What he is, more like. He walked with halting steps toward the lake. He wore vengeance for a cloak.”