The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3)

by Steven Kelliher

  “Talmir Caru,” the old man said, bowing. He did not seem mocking, and no one laughed, though Talmir’s soldiers seemed primed to rise to a challenge if given half a chance.

  “Shall we?” Talmir asked, nodding up.

  “Of course,” Pevah said, winking at Iyana and striding forward.

  “Do you need to leave orders?” Talmir asked. “We should only be gone a short while.”

  “Orders?” Pevah laughed. “I think you mistake me for a leader, Captain. I am nothing of the sort.”

  Tell that to them. Talmir kept the thought to himself, though he saw the way the nomads looked after them as he followed the old man to the base of the natural stair.

  “And up,” Pevah said, and Talmir had forgotten his age until he took that first halting step.

  They passed beyond the camp, the wind turning from teasing to blowing the higher they climbed. In the place of the ruddy red glow from the previous night, the shorn walls were lit with a silver-white light, even blue in places, as the sun sent its probes. Talmir kept glancing back down to the burnt circle of the pit and the shadows that moved about it.

  “Do not worry,” Pevah said without turning back. “No trouble down there. It’s the Mother’s land. Father was always the one for trouble.”

  “And I’m guessing Father means up,” Talmir said.

  “Higher up than we’re going.”

  Talmir did not ask for clarification and Pevah did not offer. As they walked, the old man’s demeanor changed. In place of the calm, reassuring grandfather, his outer shell seemed to harden the higher they climbed. Talmir wondered if it was owing to his presence.

  They reached the top and walked westward, the dips and shelves of the melted cave looking different in the light of day. As they rounded the bend, the stinging light lanced into Talmir’s eyes so that he had to shield them. He could not make out details beyond the yawning mouth and it was some time before he adjusted.

  “This way,” Pevah said and Talmir turned to the right, where the air smelled of fresh manure, musk and spring. The horses around their still pool were glad of their company, but Talmir saw that another was already with them.

  “I thought the air was warmer this way,” Pevah said and Creyath showed him a smile. The Ember had Talmir’s painted mare by the muzzle and was running his hands through her mane. His own charger stood beside him, waiting patiently for his turn.

  Talmir nodded at the Ember as they passed, and Creyath did not ask questions. Pevah’s eyes did not linger on Creyath like those of his people—if a Sage could truly have a people—did. He had seen his like before, Talmir supposed. It was difficult to impress power on that level, even if Talmir had yet to see evidence of it.

  The ground sloped up, and Talmir had to take care not to slip. The tunnel walls grew darker; the skylight above the horses’ pool framed their backs and the cavern walls closed in tighter, the sides sharper and more jagged.

  “Hold.” Pevah stopped abruptly and pressed his hand to Talmir’s chest, stopping him. The old man sidled to the right and the yellow light of day hit Talmir full, blinding him for a spell and causing him to sniffle and sneeze, a sound that echoed in the tunnels behind and ranged through the wind-blown land before him.

  “This way.”

  Talmir peeled his eyes from the sight beyond the gap and the sheer drop to the ridges below and followed his guide up a steep stair. The heat turned the air moist and milky as the sun baked the roof of the complex and drew the gathered moisture from the rock that hugged them.

  “Here,” Pevah said, heaving himself with effort onto the shelf. As his shadow passed away, the sun’s rays hit Talmir full in the face. He shielded his eyes and followed, climbing up onto a smooth surface of rock. The old man helped him to stand, while the wind found a gap in his shirt and cooled the sweat that stuck the cloth to his chest and back.

  Talmir had never been the talkative type, but he was rarely rendered speechless. He doubted if any could talk on seeing the sight, and judging by the knowing smile Pevah turned his way, he was right.

  They stood atop the highest of the black ridges for leagues around, though Talmir could see their like sprouting from distant dunes and canyons. He looked south, back in the direction from which they had come, and saw the sun-baked surface of white sand they had crossed shimmering in the day’s heat. Even the mountains were lost to his sight, their suggestions no more than the work of his mind filling in the gap where blue met brown and yellow.

  To the west, Talmir saw a sea as wild and wavy as any made of water. The sand ran, blew and crashed against spurs and rocky hillocks, filled the mouths of deep caverns and covered all the secrets beneath. To the west, the sky was tinted just a shade more red than in any other direction. Try as he might, Talmir could not see the cause, though the swells and crests of dry earth rose higher out that way.

  “North, Talmir,” Pevah said, guiding him that way.

  He saw the great cliffs that had been mere shadows the day before. They painted the horizon until they made the whole thing up. But, tall as they were—tenfold the size of the great peaks that ringed the Valley, at least—Talmir knew they were far enough away that he wouldn’t make it with a wagon full of meat and well water. Not without knowing the pitted and scarred and beautiful lands below.

  “That is where Ceth is from,” the old man said, staring as well. “His people are new to the sands, but they’ve known rock and wind all their lives, and in the lives of their ancestors.”

  “Ceth,” Talmir said, the name calling him back to the present.

  “Gone ranging,” Pevah said, his voice changing oddly. “Though not so far as he’d like. Gone to take his mind off the going, more like.”

  A hint of movement down below and Talmir looked back to the west. He saw red streaks and fixed his eyes on the pack of desert foxes that rode the hills and slides like a bird rides the winds. One paused and looked up at them, and Talmir saw the man beside him give the slightest nod that he could swear the creature returned.

  “You control them,” Talmir said. Guessed.

  “No,” Pevah answered. “Only men and horses can be controlled, Talmir Caru. Dogs, maybe. Perhaps a great many creatures beside. But those shepherds will be here long after we’ve passed on.”

  “We,” Talmir said. He said it with a bite he did not intend, but Pevah seemed to expect it, to take it in stride.

  “Ask me,” he said, and Talmir turned toward him, the majesty of the landscape left for now.

  “Who are you?” Talmir asked, the singular question the pulled stopper that unleashes a deluge. “Your people in the caves. How many are there? Are these the last? Are they like us? And the light ones, like Ceth. Where—”

  Pevah smiled sadly and rocked forward onto his toes.

  “I am, regrettably, who I told you I was,” he said. “I am the scourge you seek. The same your Ember blades seek to the east. The same that shares a bond, if not a brotherhood, with the shadow that has plagued your people for a hundred years and more. Much more.”

  Talmir considered him. He felt a weight drop in his chest and swayed, unsteady. He felt like a boy at the center of a tempest. He felt as powerless.

  He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath, and when he opened them, centered, he saw only regret and slow regard staring back at him through eyes he knew were far older than they appeared.

  “Are they my brothers and sisters?” Talmir asked, pointing down at the black rock on which they stood. “My cousins and would-be friends?”

  “Of a sort,” Pevah said. “There were many tribes in the deserts. Not all of them were blessed by the Mother. Not all were given fire and fight with which to combat the darkness. Not all were Emberfolk, even if they were like.”

  “How have they survived?” Talmir asked, hating the arrogance of the question even as he gave voice to it. “Because of you?”

  Pevah laughed, and Talmir knew the sound. It was self-deprecating at best and full of hate and loathing at worst.


  “The foxes have done more to protect them than I,” he said, and Talmir had difficulty knowing whether he jested. “But no, Talmir. They have been safe—relatively, and only until recently—because you left. Because T’Alon Rane took you and your Embers south, and with them, the threat from the east. For now.”

  Talmir shook his head, trying to wrap his mind around it all.

  “And Ceth? The pale ones. Who are they?”

  “Displaced children, just the same as you,” Pevah said. “From the north.” He turned back toward the distant red cliffs. “From there.” Talmir saw the wind kick up dust, though from this distance, he thought they could be boulders. “A violent land,” Pevah went on. “A land afflicted by the War of Sages before any other.”

  “Your war,” Talmir said, and now that its effects were plain, he did not regret it. He felt the slow and simmering rage boil up like the heat from the bedrock below. “You and yours.” He thought to say more, to curse Pevah and his true name, whatever it was, and all that were like him.

  The sun caught the bronze pendant that hung suspended over his chest and he remembered himself. He remembered his charge, and he took a slow and steadying breath. Pevah watched him all the while.

  “Apologies,” Talmir said, not meaning it. Pevah smiled over the hurt. His face reflected a knowing, as if he had expected nothing less than to be raged against and was at once relieved and disappointed the storm had blown out before it had started in earnest.

  “Much has happened,” Pevah said. He stepped past Talmir and stood on the edge where the black shelf met the open air. His shawl lifted and his shoulder-length hair seemed to shimmer between gray and red-brown as the open greeted him. “I’m afraid whatever stories you were told in that Valley we sent you to carry only a smoldering core of truth.” He paused. “I am not blameless, no. But the War of Sages, as it were, was never anything more than a fancy used by the people of this World to explain away conflicts beyond their reckoning. Beyond their control.”

  “But there is a conflict,” Talmir said. “It consumed our would-be guardian, just as it’s set to consume the rest. The Eastern Dark found him. Did you know that? He found the White Crest and turned him with dark magic leeched from the World Apart.”

  “Yes,” Pevah said. “I know it. I only wish I had known it sooner.”

  “Did you know what he sent against us?” Talmir asked, his voice becoming reedy, like a child’s. “Did you know the Dark Kind came against us in numbers apparently unequalled in other lands?” He swept his hands out to encompass it all—the great empty and everything beyond, in all directions.

  “They were here before,” Pevah said, moving away from the edge. He met Talmir’s eyes, but his own look seemed distant, glazed by memory and whatever regret it held. “I tried to keep his wandering eye from you. I did my best. I even fought him, and if you had seen the attempt, you’d know how paltry and pathetic that statement is.”

  He paused. Talmir waited.

  “T’Alon Rane did not come to me, like your stories tell,” Pevah said. It struck something within Talmir he hadn’t known was there, not since Kole, Linn and the others who ventured into the peaks came back bearing the news that their Ember King was alive—a figure of legend made suddenly real. Finally, the Emberfolk of the Valley had someone to blame. Someone living. Someone true.

  “You suggested we leave,” Talmir said. Pevah’s look confirmed it.

  “The truth, Talmir Caru,” he said, “is that the Eastern Dark has had your bright flames in his sight ever since he went looking where he shouldn’t have. Ever since he tugged on the doorway to the World Apart. Since he saw something that saw him back.”

  “Kole,” Talmir said, reasoning it out. “Karin’s son. He said the Embers were to be his last line against the World Apart.” He shook his head. “I didn’t believe it.” He looked at Pevah, at the man who was a Sage, with a pleading expression. “Why would he dip into the very power he seeks to survive?”

  “A question we’ve been asking for generations,” Pevah said, and now there as a cold glint to his eyes. Talmir thought it looked like steel crusted over with blood, like one of the bone blades the wild tribesmen had carried. “So far, he’s managed to dodge giving an answer.”

  “Then you must make him,” Talmir said. He sounded like Kole and knew it. They were all of them beginning to sound like Kole. Whether that was a good thing or not, he couldn’t know. Now that he was here, standing before one of the great powers of the World, Talmir felt it slipping away from him. What, he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Control, maybe. Hope, probably.

  Power, in all its forms, and him carrying less than most.

  “These thoughts are not new,” Pevah said. He watched Talmir for a reaction, but Talmir knew he had pushed too far and too fast. He thought to change tack. After all, how could he ask for aid without offering the same?

  “The savages who attacked Karin,” Talmir said, his voice lower as he tried to project calm. “Who are they? What do they want?”

  Pevah smiled in that forlorn way of his and looked back the way they’d come. Talmir followed his gaze. He could just see the great gray slabs breaking the sameness of the horizon and the threat of storm clouds far off, likely drifting over the land called Center.

  “They could have been you, in another life,” Pevah said. “If I hadn’t held myself apart for as long as I have, they might’ve been like those below.”

  “Like your people,” Talmir said.

  “They are no more my people than they are yours,” Pevah said. “No matter what they think.” There was an anger in his voice, now, but Talmir did not think it was directed at anyone but himself. “I should have been here.”

  He sighed and kicked a loose stone underfoot. It skittered to the edge of the shelf, where the wind teased it and made it lean, precarious.

  “Now it is I who must apologize,” the old man said, and Talmir saw his age in his bearing if not his face. “It has been some time since I have been … pressed. It is good, I think.”

  Talmir said nothing.

  “The savages, as your men called them, are merely one of formerly dozens of tribes native to these lands.” He looked back over the west. “In the time of your ancestors, there were as many as forty, though the definitions were threadbare at best. What separated one tribe from another was often as tenuous as a favored hunting ground. Even families crossed over. They had little need of warriors in those days. They had no word for it until the New Men came out of the east. Soldiers of Balon Rael, when that scourge known as the Eastern Dark got his claws in him for a time.” He met Talmir’s eyes. “He was looking for your Embers even then, probing the sands and the tribes within.” He laughed, humorless. “It is one of the great ironies, that it was his probing that might’ve prompted the Mother to ignite the blood of the First Keeper—the first Ember—in the first place.”

  His wry smile was wiped away like the thin veneer of sand that rested atop the black shelf.

  “When the Embers awoke, they did not spread throughout the deserts,” he said, his voice coloring with a mounting dread. “Some of the farther tribes saw this as an indictment on them. They thought the Mother had abandoned them. Others went further. They thought the Embers were a part of the same power the Sages held—Sages like myself, whom they had only before known as a strange presence in the far reaches they called Wastes. It was quiet there. None but the foxes and the wind. A good land to walk, and rest.”

  He sounded wistful now, and then he turned his eyes on Talmir.

  “You have Seers in the Valley?” he asked.

  “Brought a few along with us,” Talmir said. “Iyana—”

  “The Faeykin are not Seers,” the Sage interrupted. “Not in the way I mean. Iyana has some strong stuff to her. The other as well.”

  “Sen,” Talmir nodded, unable to suppress the grimace.

  “The Faeykin are something else,” Pevah said, turning it over. “Their power is ill-defined. I can’t see its endings. Heali
ng is the least of it, I think. It goes much deeper than that. And whatever sight they have—whatever she has—it’s tied very much to the World, and not, I think, to time.” That seemed strange to Talmir, and he said as much.

  “You speak as if you don’t know what they are.”

  “Any Sage who pretends to know of the Landkist in any of their forms is a liar or a fool,” he said. “I am many things, and perhaps in the past I have counted myself a fool. But not where power and all its strange persuasions is concerned.”

  “Yes,” Talmir said, speeding the thought along. “We have Seers. At least, those who claim to be.”

  Pevah nodded. “Assuming they have not lost their touch, they owe their gifts to the wet rituals. Many of the tribes, yours included, frowned upon the practice. Sight demands sacrifice. But they endured, and in the wilder tribes, they came to dominate. They sowed in their warriors and in their hunters and what children they bore the seeds of hatred and deep mistrust. Mistrust of the Sages, yes—a deserved tag—but also of the Landkist, and the Embers most of all.”

  Talmir nodded, the beginnings of the picture forming. “They—”

  “Are a twisted, misshapen form of what you could have been,” Pevah said. He tapped his light-shod foot on the rocky shelf, and Talmir only now noticed they were bare beneath the hems of his loose-fitting trousers.

  “Fine,” Talmir said, trying to sift through it and come to something that stuck. “And why are these tribesmen hunting you?”

  “Who said they were?” Pevah asked. He did not seem ready to lie, and Talmir showed his annoyance.

  “The patrols,” Talmir said. “I’ve seen your men and women coming and going and bringing nothing back. They aren’t hunting. And the Landkist, Ceth.”

  “What of him?”

  “He’s upset,” Talmir said. “He thinks you’re making a mistake letting us in. My guess? He thinks we’ve led them right to you.”

  Another laugh, but this one short. Talmir was close.