The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3)

by Steven Kelliher

  Talmir nearly reached a hand out to stop the old man before something like terror gripped him. It froze him in place just long enough for the old man’s robes to brush past him. He would have turned if the glowing coals of Creyath’s eyes had not caught him and drawn him to the smile he wore beneath.

  A good start, that smile seemed to say. A good start to an end.

  Iyana had managed to keep her mind blank throughout most of the exchange, only entering it toward the end. She was tired. She was irritable. She was sick.

  Looking at anything for too long made her dizzy. The smell—salt and smoke and crisp—was tinged with the odor of blood. She could not help but picture the hammerhorn as it had been before Ceth had driven his hand like a hammer into its skull and the soft stuff within. The syrupy wine that dribbled down the chins of their desert hosts carried a sweetness that could easily turn to rot when twisted on the breeze and her foul mood.

  Karin sat very close to her, out at the edge of the shelf. She wished he wouldn’t, though she could not bear to tell him. Iyana, who had always preferred the company of others to solitude, now wished to be entirely alone.

  She would look up occasionally to see if one of the gray-cloths had moved close enough to Captain Talmir to be considered a threat. The soldiers of the Valley seemed to think so. They had moved to encircle the group around the fire. Those with darker skin and brighter sashes were slower to movement—slower to rile on behalf of the Sage they guarded like wolves—but Iyana could see their tethers take on a red tint as they simmered. Once these were going, it would come to something ill. She knew then that these were indeed the same as the Emberfolk of the Valley, their sires or their legacy.

  Twice, she glimpsed Sen staring at her from across the way, his eyes dimmer than they were wont to be. When she raised her own to meet them, they flicked away with something she took for embarrassment at first and later recognized with a cold and creeping certainty to be fear. The bright cloak that usually enveloped him was barely visible. Iyana doubted she’d be able to see it even if she were to dip into the Between. As it was, the incident on the southern spur had left her with the most potent haze she had ever experienced in her short time testing her Sight without Ninyeva’s guiding presence.

  Voices were raised and Iyana felt the first stab of panic as her conscious mind caught up to her in her malaise. There was a stink of violence on the air and she thought she might make herself useful trying to stop it. And then the old man withdrew and Talmir let him go, though she knew he wanted to stop him, to reach out and shake him, if not throttle him. He wanted to shout into the Sage’s face and curse him and cast him down. He wanted to blame him for all the wrong that had ever been done to the Valley peoples and any of the free folk in the World they were only just getting to know.

  Iyana knew this because she wanted the same. She saw it reflected in the glowing ambers of Creyath just as she felt it in the rigid bearing that was usually so fluid in Karin Reyna. She could see it in the lost and vacant expressions of the desert soldiers, merchants and hopeful travelers now verging on the opposite as they indulged in a Sharing that felt as false to her as her own goodness.

  “Iyana?”

  She looked up to see Karin standing over her. He held a stone bowl out to her. She took it with a smile she tried to mean and delighted in the cool water as it splashed into her mouth, thankful the First Runner had not brought her blood and death to swallow with all the rest.

  Iyana set the bowl down and nodded her thanks, and Karin seemed to think about sitting beside her once more but decided to move over to speak with Talmir instead. He was a good presence to have, Iyana thought. Kole had been right for suggesting he come, though she knew the thought was selfish, since Karin would have been as much a boon to her wayward friends and family beneath the towering trees of Center.

  Her thoughts had drifted enough that she came back to the inevitable in due time. She saw the red teeth set into a hard grimace, dried blood stained maroon in a striped mask and fresh red dripping down below the chin as the savage girl had struggled under Sen’s ethereal grip.

  Iyana had not known it was possible, but something had clicked in her when she had seen it. It made sense all of a sudden, and she wondered if Ninyeva ever would have shown her even had she known of these dark gifts. Of course the Faeykin could challenge free will. They could push and pull emotion. She had seen the Faey Mother do it, albeit subtly and never through force. She had seen her hold children and elders alike in thrall during the telling of her tales in the Long Hall as the Dark Kind assailed the timber walls. She had only done it to protect them, never to wrench the very being of another, to pin them down, thrashing and spitting.

  When she had come upon the scene, Iyana had been brought back to a much more grisly image from a past that was not her own. She saw it again as if traipsing through Tu’Ren Kadeh’s memory for the first time, when the First Keeper-to-be had come upon the horror the Valley Faey had wrought against the rebel hunters, who had gone against them absent command and without the backing of the Emberfolk of Hearth or Last Lake. The Faey had dark gifts as well, Ninyeva had told her, but she had never seen the work such gifts could do until she had seen it through Tu’Ren’s eyes; like a person turned inside-out and made unreal. Like healing done in reverse.

  She could not be certain if Sen would have done it, but she had acted without thinking and without knowing how. She had flashed into the Between but kept close to her body, and below her all the tethers shone like beacons brighter than the stars. While most drifted like strings on the wind, one was like a gem in their midst, pulsing with a yellow-green aura. It was the tether Sen kept closely guarded—the one he wrapped around himself so it could not be used against him, as he now used the intruder’s.

  Iyana steeled herself and dove down like a bird of prey. She severed the connection between Sen and the intruder and wrapped her own self about it. Try as she might, she still could not remember how she had, but she had gripped Sen’s tether like she was a ball and it the chain, and she had pulled him down and held him there until the others had fallen on both.

  She had snapped back into herself and nearly cried out from the sudden pain in her knees. She had fallen, the rough surface of the spur scoring gouges into her knees and palms. Her heart beating furiously, she looked to Sen and saw him regarding her with something well beyond fear and close to terror.

  The savage died, and for a space Iyana thought she might’ve done it, or Sen. But she knew she hadn’t, and Sen seemed just as surprised as she was. She dipped back into the Between in a move that nearly made her retch and saw nothing emanating from the intruder’s boney coil—no light to be had at all. It was as if it had been severed from afar, or drained. She thought she heard a humming on the wind, like the cold, bloody song Karin had described on first meeting the Bloody Screamers in their sandy trap to the east.

  Iyana had never felt shame like that. As she had looked around at the others—Karin and Creyath included—the feeling had only redoubled. And as she had settled down around the fire on the shelf, gathered around the kill she had observed and in the company of those who had seen her wield the will of another like a horse’s reins, she felt on the verge of retching again.

  The argument and its ensuing ending had done little to bolster her mood, and before Ket or Jes or Mial or any other friends new and old could make another try to take her mind off it, Iyana stood and stepped off the shelf onto the soft, cool sand of the desert night. She tossed Karin a look as she did to let him know, and the First Runner nodded, though he looked troubled.

  The air had a cool bite that she welcomed, even a short distance from the crackling flames and the resurgent conversations around it. The mood was still tense, but Pevah had put down the argument and Talmir had eventually let him. The others had no quarrel. Iyana had to wonder if their hosts truly wanted them there, or if they had begun to lean a little too heavily on the hospitality of a people who seemed a good sight more desperate than those fleein
g their own sort of desperation.

  Iyana saw the purple and amber glow to the west and tried to see it for something other than a portent—something apart from an unknown horror lurking below and causing the sands to vibrate with a dark energy that reminded her of the White Crest. It had the stink of Sage magic, and Iyana was beginning to carve an impression of what might be beneath, even if she couldn’t know it for certain.

  Tonight, she let the horizon be what it would: beautiful. It was a red-orange jewel or a suggestion of tomorrow thrown up in reverse, like the day retreating and casting a longing goodbye out behind it with the promise of tomorrow’s warmth.

  She smiled, leaving her dour thoughts behind and picking her way among the black, shining surfaces of the stalagmites, ridges and pitted mounds that held the sea of sand up in all directions. As she moved, she beheld the northern cliffs that bore only the hint of pink in what light they caught from the Dunes. They were distant, no matter how much they loomed, and Iyana let herself marvel at their impossible heights. She paused in a narrow pocket and looked up at them beneath a black overhang, closing her eyes and imagining the distant howl of the wind through the crags. She wondered what stories that land had to tell. She wondered how far it went.

  Even that thought eventually brought its slow and aching way back around to a dark one: that Ceth and his people had come down from those heights for a reason. And as Iyana and her own were well aware, one did not venture far from home unless need or desperation drove him. The War of Sages had claimed plenty in the crossfire between god-like forces. But she thought the true tragedy was in the exploration—the wanderlust—that the conflict had drained from the World’s respective peoples.

  Some would blame the Dark Months and the horrors they held for the isolation which other peoples might not feel as keenly as her own. But Iyana knew the same truth all Emberfolk felt at their core, even if tales of the desert days—tales born of the lands she walked now—were sparse on detail. The Dark Months and the Sages were connected. The World Apart, the source of so much strife and so much misery. They were tied together, inextricable as the sand from its many buried crevices and canyons.

  Iyana walked between the ridges, the shelves sending up their sharp complaints to the desert curtain above. She walked until she no longer felt the light of the fire on the nape of her neck and climbed atop another shelf that seemed to spill out like a lip between two great slabs. A part of her thought she had gone too far, but she heard the call of the desert foxes and felt comforted by it, though its haunting melody left her tossing and turning upon first coming to these lands.

  She ran her hand along the glass-like surface of the rock face and imagined how it was all a singular thing, like a single cut of onyx that ran all the way to the lake far below, which sheltered the desert children and kept them warm and cool at the same time. She let herself drift on currents that had nothing to do with the Between and did not notice the smile that came to her face while she walked, tracing the dips and grooves in the jagged shelf.

  She stopped and looked to the west again. She was closer now, the rock having led her out farther onto the sands. She looked to the south and saw the glow of the fire that was not so far, heard the voices drifting on the cool breeze and saw the shadowed hints of the desert foxes sliding between dunes, full on the salted meat they had helped to bring down as they wrestled and rolled and loved in the underbellies of the desert hills that had raised them.

  There was a presence she had not noticed before, like a stone dropped into a pool she swam in without making a sound. Iyana felt her heart catch in her throat and froze.

  “You are far from the rest.”

  She knew the voice but not well enough to attach a face to it until the panic had done its work. She whirled and nearly smashed her nose into the broad chest of Ceth. He stood on the same lip as she, and while she was initially annoyed at his seeming ambush, a look down at his feet demonstrated that he had been here the whole time, and that she was the disturber and not the disturbed. His boots were tucked in a crevice, and one of the gourds leaned on its side. She looked up into his face and saw traces of that sweet-smelling liquid on the corners of his lips. His bangs, sticky with the day’s sweat, had been stuck up by the wind that was stronger here than it had been further in.

  His eyes looked strange in the dim half-light, the closest this land came to night. Iyana thought at first that he might’ve partaken in too much wine and then noted the dried salt tracks that rimmed his eyes. Seeing her examination, he frowned, and Iyana took a step back that nearly sent her over into the soft sand and whatever jagged shards lurked just below its surface. Ceth caught her by the wrist and steadied her.

  Iyana realized with a start that she had ignored him.

  “Yes,” she said awkwardly. She felt strange under his gaze. He watched her closely as she spoke, as if weighing every word and the intent behind them. “I’m not in the mood for sharing, you could say.” She shrugged and knew it sounded pitiful. It was pitiful, but it was the truth.

  Ceth only nodded and looked out over the slope. Iyana saw a small clutch of figures moving away from them with packs slung over their shoulders. Some had blades that caught the silver shafts of moonlight that spilled down from above, flashing like fish at the Fork.

  Iyana regarded Ceth. She felt like raising some alarm or another, but seeing his look and tracing the source of his recent hurt, she thought this was a known thing.

  “Pevah knows,” she said as much as asked. He blinked.

  “Of course,” he said. “It is our cha—”

  “Your charge,” Iyana finished, only realizing she sounded like Talmir Caru after she had spoken. “The Midnight Dunes.”

  “Yes,” Ceth said. He did not say it with a hint of emotion, either positive of negative, but rather with a quiet zeal that reminded her in an unpleasant way of Seer Rusul and her sisters, whom Ninyeva had not-so-affectionately dubbed ‘the Crows.’

  “They did not want to disturb the Sharing,” Ceth said and Iyana had to laugh. He turned a questioning look on her, and she thought he even swayed a little as the wind picked up. He frowned and placed a steadying hand against the back shelf.

  “I think I did a good enough job of that,” Iyana said, but Ceth was already shaking his head before she finished.

  “It was not you,” he said. He grimaced, and it was the most genuine look she had yet seen from him. “They will keep coming.” He looked back to the horizon, and the longer they stared, the more Iyana could see the faint, glowing mounds that broke the flat plains in the distance.

  All manner of questions rose in Iyana’s mind and she thought to give voice to them. She thought to ask why. Instead, she sighed.

  “You aren’t going?”

  Ceth’s silence was deafening. His face contorted and then switched back to its former veiled serenity. He did not meet her eyes when he answered. “Pevah wishes me to stay. For now.”

  “For now,” Iyana repeated and Ceth did not nod. He only stared after the departing figures with a look like despair. “The foxes don’t follow them,” she said, frowning as she noted the pack watching the warriors from a raised pile to the southwest.

  Ceth shook his head. “They are wise beasts.” He nearly smiled. “Sometimes I think Pevah is right about them.”

  “In what way?” Iyana asked, curious.

  “That they are the true guardians of this land,” he said, his voice coated in disbelief, or reverence. It was difficult to tell.

  “Good,” Iyana said, seizing on the chance, however threadbare. “Then that should free up your Sage to lend what aid he can to our cause.” Ceth did not frown as she had expected him to, nor did he raise an argument or slip away beneath the crags. Instead, he fell back into that blank mask he wore that was like judgment, though the cave wine had done its work. She could see something below the surface, struggling to rise. A reaction. A want to speak and be heard. To make her listen.

  “You heard the argument, I take it,” Iyana
said. She looked away from him so as not to antagonize. She felt comfortable around Ceth, so much so that it nearly had the opposite effect. Bouts of panic swelled in her chest that were a far cry from butterflies, but then he would speak, and the feeling would go away. Iyana knew she had a tendency to dip into her gifts without meaning to. Ninyeva had warned her about doing so in the presence of Landkist she didn’t know. The Faey Mother had meant the Rockbled like Braden Taldis—or so she thought—but could she have foreseen others out in the wider World? Could she have known?

  Iyana thought that Ceth hadn’t answered until she saw him staring at her with an expectant look.

  “I said, who could not?”

  Iyana blushed. “Yes, well.” She cleared her throat and took a step back from the lip of the ledge, allowing the deeper shadows of the obsidian overhang to envelop her. “Captain Talmir has his reasons for pressing.”

  “We all do,” Ceth said. He did not say it in a way that spoke of sympathy. “But Pevah will not leave this land. Not while—”

  “You believe in it so much?” Iyana asked, surprising even herself at the quick and sudden ferocity of her tone. “You believe in your charge? His charge? You believe in him?”

  Ceth’s expression made it clear what the answer was. Only a single answer, and to all of the questions she’d blubbered out like a fool. It made her angry, and Iyana felt more akin to Talmir Caru than she had in many days. She felt his frustration and she felt his helplessness. And now, she had a target.

  “Is it so strange to you people for one to have a purpose?”

  Iyana felt as if she’d been slapped, and she nearly returned the favor. She even raised her hand before she noticed she had. She caught herself and felt a stab of fear that rushed up as the anger sank. But Ceth only stared.

  “You know nothing of our purpose,” Iyana said, emphasizing every word. “You know nothing of what we have endured. Of what we’ve survived.”