The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3)

by Steven Kelliher

  “The bulls will abandon their fight as soon as they’re attacked,” Ceth said. His eyes tracked the progress of the hunter to the south, who had begun his own sliding descent. “But their blood is up. They are foolish in the rut. That’s why they come to this crater.”

  “Crater?” Iyana said, unfamiliar with the term. She looked to Karin and Creyath, both of whom shrugged.

  “It’s the word Pevah uses,” Ceth said by way of explanation. He did not elaborate. Iyana looked down into the carved bowl. She might have called it a canyon, but there was something different about it. The walls weren’t solid, though its shape was almost strangely regular. In a way, it looked as though the whole of it had been dug out and planted with the storm’s growth the herd trampled. Across the way, toward the south, there was a scar gouged into it that had turned to a spill. That was where the bulls must have come from. Near as Iyana could tell, it was the only way out, as she did not think even Ceth could climb the crusted and slipping edges that went out from it.

  “We cannot take one of the dead, no matter how fresh,” the Landkist continued. “Even if it was not against the way, it would spur the bulls to cohesion. They would join together and see us dead, or them. No matter the cost.”

  He spoke of them as if they were people. Iyana met Karin’s eyes. The only hint of what he thought was in the slight raising of his brows. Still, he kept his opinion to himself.

  “Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for meat,” Creyath said. “Do you not have enough growing in the caves?”

  “It is not a matter of enough,” Ceth said. He shook his head, tiring of explanations. “It is the way of things. Pevah says there must be blood for a Sharing.”

  It sounded dark and strange to Iyana, but all lands had their rituals. Even the animals milling and killing and dying below them. Even the foxes that ringed them and stepped among them, yipping and whining. They pawed at the rise and snapped at Ceth’s shins without biting, as if spurring him on.

  “When we start down the rise, only ride the crust until you feel the wind sting.” He fixed his eyes on Iyana, his expression intense and unreadable. “When it does, move to the next.”

  “What does that mean?” Karin asked. He watched the hunters as they reached the midway point of their respective descents. Though far away, they looked to be moving quickly to Iyana, and their sections weren’t nearly as steep as their own.

  “Left,” Ceth said, surprising them by hopping that way. “Or right.” He mirrored the motion on the opposite side. “Otherwise, you will go too quickly and be buried. You must stay atop the crest. The underside is very soft, and very deep.”

  Iyana looked back at the horses, standing snout to snout a good distance from the foxes. Creyath’s charger stamped, nostrils opening and closing as it nodded dramatically, likely scenting the scene below. She felt the same way, but while the black charger seemed eager to join in the fray, she was anything but.

  “You talk about the sand as if it’s an ocean,” Karin said with a huff. He glanced nervously at Iyana, but she knew he wouldn’t forbid her coming.

  “Pevah says the sea used to come here.” They regarded Ceth, whose voice had changed. Now it carried an airiness to it that reminded Iyana of someone speaking through a dream. He sounded disappointed. Even sad. “Not anymore.”

  A shrill whistle cut the air and Iyana leaned forward as Ceth waved to the hunter to the west. He was at the bottom, now, down on one knee, his bow held out horizontally before him. To the south, the other was just settling into a similar position, near the broken rise the bulls had made. It looked as if both were trying to avoid notice. So far, they had succeeded. The bulls in the center of the crater formed a spiral that spun outward. Every so often, they would crash back in like a whirlpool, sending up those sharp cracks in the place of white foam. Iyana thought she could see flecks of red.

  And each time they clashed, the foxes’ yips turned to longer notes that now rose into something like the nighttime song they filled the yawning gaps and twisting tunnels of the desert with when the tribesmen filled their bedrolls and took to sleep.

  “Can you soothe them?”

  Iyana did not realize the question had been directed at her until she blinked and saw the men staring, Ceth with that same intensity that made her want to look away.

  “The foxes?” Iyana asked, glancing nervously about.

  “The hammerhorns,” Ceth said, pointing down into the crater without taking his eyes from her.

  Iyana frowned and Ceth mirrored her, while Karin and Creyath looked from one to the other as the foxes whipped themselves into a frenzy that made it hard to concentrate.

  “Pevah says you have a strange power,” Ceth said. “He says you can bend emotion.” Perhaps that explained his apparent distrust of her. Then again, Ceth seemed to treat all of them with the same distance and veiled disdain.

  “I am Faeykin,” Iyana said. The term meant nothing to Ceth and his look showed it. “No,” she said with a helpless shrug. “I don’t think I can.”

  Ceth frowned, but not in a way that seemed angry. It almost looked as if he thought she was lying.

  “Pevah doesn’t know everything, you know,” she said, regretting the words immediately. Luckily, Ceth didn’t seem the type to take things personally.

  “None do,” he said, gray-blue eyes fixed on the herd below and their cyclone of dust and death.

  With that, he vanished. At least, the lip of the sandy ledge on which he stood did. Iyana was too startled to make a sound as Karin and Creyath darted forward and peered over the lip. In a breadth, Karin followed, pulling himself over the crusted edge and sliding down on his backside as much as on his boots. As they looked on, Karin leapt from one crumbling cut of crusted sand to the next, his path erring northward. Ceth—contrary to his own advice—took a path straight down the steep slope, the crust doing little more than shivering as he planted and leapt with that strange, floating weightlessness. He leaned forward, gaining speed with each fall even as his impacts looked to do little more than suggest his presence to the tenuous ground below.

  “You don’t have to go,” Creyath said, sounding as if he wanted nothing more than to stay behind. Iyana felt his heat radiate as his blood warmed to the task. Red flashed before her and the foxes started down, slipping and rolling in a controlled tumble behind their leader.

  “I’m lighter than you,” Iyana said. She did not wait for the Ember’s response and pulled herself over the ledge. Or tried to. Instead, it crumbled beneath her and landed with a jarring impact on the slope below as Iyana leaned back, the palms of her hands sending up jets of sand that slowed her only enough to avoid going over. It seemed steeper now that she was in it. Much steeper, and much faster.

  She half leapt, half rolled to her left as the crust beneath her dissolved. She hit the hard shell, expelling what air she held, and thought she’d continue down the slope that way, tumbling to her unceremonious death. Then the ground shifted, the sheer wall of the crater’s side sliding and stopping her roll as it bore her down under the shifting sea of soft sand beneath.

  Iyana’s heart felt like it was clogging her throat. She heard the foxes’ mingled hunting songs as they streaked past her. And she heard another sound, much closer, and rising. She felt tears streaking back from the corners of her eyes and discovered the source of the sound with surprise.

  She was laughing.

  Nothing in the World had ever given her such a feeling of total abandon. Not even in the Between had she felt so free. Her life was forfeit, and yet, as her jagged ship of hard sand crumbled to powder on reaching the bottom, she was alive. And but for a few scrapes and bruises that would not rise until later, she was also unharmed.

  Firm hands lifted her and she leaned into Karin, wiping away tears as she laughed. He shook with concern but showed her a relieved smile as Ceth examined them both. The foxes spilled around them, and then a wash of heat greeted their backs as Creyath tumbled and shook himself at the bottom, his spill com
ing down with more loose stuff than the rest combined as he righted himself. That made Iyana laugh more. She had never felt such unbridled joy and freedom.

  And then she saw Ceth tense and looked to the west, toward a wall of hard-boned fury.

  Iyana cursed herself a fool for having come, for endangering those who were better equipped. But then such thoughts fled, replaced with a stunned awe as the masters went to work.

  It began with Ceth and then with the desert foxes. The northern Landkist shot forward faster than any Ember Iyana had known. Faster even than Kole. He streaked toward the wall of stamping bulls with their bonemetal horns and their flat cudgels for brows. He seemed to fly over the sand, the foxes trailing him like the white-tipped waves that follow a ship at storm.

  “Karin …” Creyath stepped forward and Iyana felt his heat redouble as he looped his Everwood bow from around his back, nocking one of his arm-length arrows to the cord.

  “Wait,” Karin said. The First Runner was tense. He still crouched in the same position he had landed, hand outstretched toward the Second Keeper of Hearth. “They know these beasts better than us. We don’t know how they’ll react if you rain fire in their midst.”

  “Much the same as any other, I’d guess,” Creyath said.

  “No,” Iyana said. “They’re different here. In this place.” She was unable to take her eyes from Ceth as he leapt impossibly high and twirled in midair, coming to land amid the throng of black fur and jagged spikes. There was a boom that sounded like a tower falling; the beasts’ frothing rage turned in to a singular panic that scattered them, though Iyana thought she saw some sent skittering from the place Ceth had landed as if pushed by some great gust.

  But Pevah had said Ceth did not wield the winds as the White Crest had.

  The wall of hammerhorns turned back into a churning cyclone of hoof and muscled flank, and Iyana could see the gray sash and silver hair darting to and fro in their midst. Twice she saw black horns attempt to spear him. Over and under, he dodged them with ease. He fought like a ghost and he fought without fighting. Though she held no doubt he could have laid the first of them low with ease, so masterful was his control, he opted instead to stir them like an elixir of wild fury before setting them loose on the crater. They spun out like a whirlpool heading in the wrong direction, and the red foxes circled them at a full sprint, nipping and barking them into some semblance of sense only they could see.

  One broke off from the rest and headed straight for them, and Karin stood as Creyath took a step forward. A yellow-fletched shaft buried itself in the turf just before the bull’s lead hooves and it turned away, narrowly avoiding being impaled by one of its fellows and crushed beneath the weight of its passing.

  Now that she saw them at work—the hunters on the edges shooting their missiles to corral rather than kill, the Landkist in the center of the throng disturbing and provoking rather than destroying—Iyana thought she knew why they could not simply kill one. This was a tribe, of sorts. These warrior males were driven away from their wives and children for no other reason than the ghosts of memory pulling them on. If one fell in a way unbecoming of their charge—their sacred ritual—they would join together in common goal.

  Ceth wouldn’t allow that to happen. He flitted like a sparrow and dove like a hawk, and each time he leapt, he seemed to go higher until Iyana was convinced he commanded the air itself, and with no wind to speak of.

  “He flies,” Karin breathed.

  “He falls,” Creyath said. But it wasn’t so much that Ceth fell, thought Iyana; it was that he floated or crashed. There was no in-between. Either he spilled down like a leaf in a lazy current, or he slammed into the sand and sent up a plume of earth, green shoots and white flowers.

  Once or twice, Iyana thought for sure the bulls circling on the edges would come for them, so wide did the spiral of hoof and horn expand. But the foxes turned them back in, some of the more daring members of the pack darting under their black bellies and nipping at their black lips and snouts to turn them away. After a time, Creyath lowered his bow, his heat dissipating as it became clear his fire would do nothing but cause a chaos that would clash with whatever order the hunters had made.

  Ceth danced his strange, rhythmic dance in the center of the crater and the bulls spun around him, running and running themselves ragged until they began to funnel out of the bowl, their paths taking them up the spill of sand and gravel on the southern side.

  Soon, the dust obscured everything, and Iyana focused on the shadows that passed in the smoky haze like wraiths or spirits—like Mother Ninyeva’s stories come vividly to life.

  When the dust cleared, only one bull was left in the crater. At least, only one living, as the corpses of the herd’s own war littered the canyon in every direction. This lone warrior stood and stamped in the center, staring death in the face. Ceth stood directly before it while the desert foxes sat or paced around it, their hunting song quieted now that the killing was all but done. The two hunters and their colored shafts circled in.

  “Bravest,” Ceth said, and the bull faced him head-on. It remained still, tail flicking, eyes glaring with an intensity that was not quite hate as it took in the silver hair, loose-fitting clothes and gray sash that billowed before it like a flag of conquest. Seeing the exchange, Iyana had the distinct impression she was witnessing something that bordered on sacred.

  The bull Ceth addressed had not been chosen because it was lame. The foxes did not make for it because it would crush them into the dust and dirt and stain it all red. This was a mighty creature, all muscle and rawhide, musk and fury. This was a bull who, though old, had sired many of those who watched him from the western ridge. It had been chosen because it had been the one to stay and fight a Landkist whose power it could not hope to match. And now it would die, and try as she might, Iyana could not find it in her to see the sorrow in it. After all, hadn’t they come here to do just that? To die, or else to see who would live?

  “Bravest,” Ceth said again, and the bull snorted and stamped. Ceth took a step forward and the bull stayed still, though Iyana could see the fibers shift beneath its sun-baked hide. The foxes rose and tensed, their role in the hunt finished but their senses keen, yellow eyes watchful for a sudden attack.

  Iyana moved forward and Karin reached for her, but did not pull her back. The bull swung its great head in her direction, red-rimmed eyes staring as it expelled a mix of blood, snot and crusted sand from its nose. It stamped again, eyes darting between her, the hunters with their fletched shafts and the desert foxes that encircled it and waited, patient as any.

  Now she sensed the fear it had kept well-hidden in the company of its fellows. The beast did not look to Ceth, nor to Creyath—foes Iyana knew it had judged beyond itself.

  There was a peal of close-by thunder. Iyana saw shadows moving along the sand. She looked up and saw what she had mistaken for cloud cover to be the shadowed figures of the bull’s companions standing on the western ledge. They did not stamp, knowing the ground might betray them to their deaths. They stood and watched, silent as warriors at a vigil. They wanted to see how their own would choose to meet his end. She knew this without dipping into the Between—or perhaps she had slipped, though she could not see the tethers of man of beast waving in the burnt light of the late day.

  Iyana thought of trying to soothe the bull as Ceth had suggested. She thought of working her magic with an intent behind it that she did not use on the horses, though they seemed to respond to her as if she had. The bull stomped and she heard Karin issue a warning low in his throat, only realizing how close she had come to the beast when she saw how far her companions’ shadows were from her. They would not come closer. To do so would be to invite death, most likely her own.

  The hammerhorn swung its head back and forth, stomping emphatically. Foam flecked its dripping mouth and black syrup crusted the crevices beneath its eyes. Iyana closed her eyes and ignored the sickening thrum she had felt since coming to the deserts. She moved past it
and began to sway. She saw the bull’s bright tether before she opened her eyes. It was bold and blue and striking like a clear sky.

  She saw the tethers of those gathered, and the lot of them—even the doomed beast—seemed to stand still as she examined. There was a quiver in the blue that she recognized as fear. She did not know how—the how, as Ninyeva always said, was something to focus on after—but she brushed up against it without moving. Smoothed it away. The bull raised its head and exhaled. It might have been thanks. It might have been a consideration to strike her down then and there, to add her bones to those that would soon litter the canyon—that were likely buried beneath their feet.

  Iyana stepped back and watched as the bull turned to meet its fate: Ceth.

  She felt Karin make a grab for her as the bull exploded into motion, the only warning a premature yip from one of the foxes who must’ve seen the twitch Ceth could not have. The bull moved faster than she would have thought possible, and Iyana feared she had doomed both man and beast as it made for the Landkist.

  But Ceth only took in the approach. He spread his stance, feet out in something akin to the forms Larren Holspahr put Kole and the others through in the yard as children. Only he had no fire. She whirled on Karin, meaning to tell him to intervene, but his look told her he would not. She looked to the hunters on either side of the exchange and was disturbed to see their arrow tips pointed down.

  It was finished in a strike between blinks. The Landkist pushed the bull aside and straightened as it fell with a thump that was not half as emphatic as a creature of such strange majesty deserved. There was no blood and no weapon to have made it, but Iyana felt she did not want to approach the bull and inspect the side of its skull where Ceth had struck.

  Iyana, Karin, Creyath and the red-sashed hunters watched Ceth as he turned to consider his audience on the ridge. The bulls there were still as the crust on which they stood. They looked down with eyes that were veiled in shadow as the sun turned orange and red at their backs, turning their coats the color of blood. Those in back turned and moved off, heading for the flatlands, and the rest rolled away like a slow wave withdrawing.