The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3)

by Steven Kelliher

  He scanned the rest of them, and Talmir thought his eyes already moved more quickly than they had before, a bit of the feral form he had seen down below coming back to the surface. It was not a threat, but a promise of what he brought with him.

  Ceth regarded Pevah with a face of hardened stone, but he otherwise made no further argument.

  “How do they plan to do it?” Karin asked. “How do they plan to wake it?”

  “Blood magic,” Pevah said with a shrug—an odd reaction to Talmir. “A thing I used to doubt. No longer. If they’re moving with this much purpose and trying to get us to do the same, doubting them will avail us little.”

  The Sage made as if to turn again, but he paused and lingered on Karin.

  “You are named ‘Runner’,” he said and Karin nodded once. “We have a few of those.” The Sage tossed his head to the west, and they followed. There, Talmir saw the figures he hadn’t noticed before, the red foxes still and silent as shadows among the dips and swaths of the dark sands. “It is a comfort to have you among them.” He smiled and Karin seemed to relax slightly. “These children of the desert have lost the art, I’m afraid. There is much more to running than moving fast.”

  If any of his people took offense at the words, they didn’t show it.

  “Sad to say,” Karin responded, “but there are few of us left in the Valley as well.”

  “None, aside from you,” Mial said gruffly and Karin dipped a modest bow. It was true that he had taken Mial and Jes under his wing since departing the Valley—he had stressed the import of scouts to Talmir before joining him on his wayward road—but neither of them had taken on the title in anything more than name.

  “May you be our shadow,” Pevah said. Karin crinkled his brow, but his look was something like memory—of recognition. “May they be yours.” He nodded toward the desert sentinels among their mounds and piles, and Talmir had to blink lest he imagine them nodding back.

  There was nothing left to be done but to do a thing, and so they departed. Pevah stepped down onto the narrow river bend, and in place of a considered gait he bent into a lope. The desert foxes hopped and bounced in a strange mania, running toward the group before splitting off and heading for the west. Ceth leapt forward, sailing farther than he should have and letting the light breeze carry him.

  And the rest followed, the red-sashes and the gray spilling forth and Talmir and his soldiers following. None tried to keep pace with the northern Landkist who had already outstripped the Sage in front; none save for Karin Reyna, who skimmed the surface of the sand in a way that belied his weight and seemed to suggest it as nothing more than illusion. He ranged north as often as west, and just when Talmir thought he saw him coming up on his right, he would note him on his left and wonder how he had cut paths that intersected their own without breaking stride or even much in the way of sweat.

  Their initial energy gave way to a pace Talmir felt they could maintain for some time—a jog that bordered a run without crossing over. He glanced toward Iyana and saw that she had rolled up her pant legs in preparation. Her white bangs had been brushed back from her brow and now stuck against her temples, trailing like bright moonlit streamers behind her ears. Ket ran beside her, close enough to protect without coddling, and behind them the red-sashes kept a healthy distance as they constantly scanned any sloped horizon the First Runner or his streaming foxes might mix.

  There was nothing more to be said, and so they said nothing—the men and women, at least. But for the desert foxes there was much to be discussed. The foxes raised their songs, and though Talmir had heard the haunting melodies since first crossing the cracked plains to the east, now they took on a new feeling that was like urgency. It quickened his heart, and his legs’ pace. It rang from the scabbard and its silver blade that bounced against his thigh. And it rang in his ears and vibrated within the confines of his skull, forming granules of resolve that had him thinking of those of the earth beneath his boots.

  It felt as if they ran in a dream, following a hooded figure who no longer pretended to be a man. Pevah was gone for the moment, and in the relative silence and anonymity the desert night afforded him, his movements took on the strange and halting grace of something else—something that had earned the name he tried so hard to leave behind, along with whatever else it carried.

  None looked back toward the black shelves they left behind, nor the children who sheltered within them. They did not look to one another except to check that all were keeping up—their human pack within the loose and sure embrace of the desert foxes. Three dozen sets of eyes were ahead, and the night sky grew to look more like poison day the farther they roamed.

  Soon, the black shelves gave way to thorny spurs, and the dunes ebbed and flowed like lazy and undulating waves. As they put more swells behind them than he could count, the waves grew shorter and the swaths between them shallower—more dips than canyons.

  An hour passed and then two, and soon enough the sounds of breath alerted each as to the position of the others now that night had descended in full. Even the ruddy brightness of the west seemed to paint everything else in shadow, the figures ahead recalling the lurching shapes of the Dark Kind. The loose lines they had first formed upon descending onto the sands had spread and broken apart, and Talmir felt the first pangs of worry strike him.

  Apparently, his feeling was shared, as the next rise was dotted with waiting figures, Pevah and Ceth first among them.

  Talmir slowed his trot to a trudge as he reached the top, and as he looked behind him, he was shocked to see how far the others were spread. He picked out Iyana’s white hair and saw that only Ket remained close to her. Jes hung back with the red-sashes, who had spread far enough apart that he could not make them all out.

  Talmir felt a thrumming in his legs that had his thoughts turning into the reaches of memory. An image of Hearth’s muddy training yards came up unbidden, and he could almost hear the sharp and cutting voice of First Keeper Vennil Cross battering him and driving him on like no wind or lashing rain ever could.

  “Your people,” Pevah said, “they need rest?” His voice was calm and steady as Talmir’s soldiers turned in and made their aching way toward the summit—seemingly the last of its kind for leagues all around.

  Talmir took stock of them. His soldiers looked away as often as they met his eyes, which told him all it needed to. He saw another glint of moonlight and recognized it as Sen coming up behind Mial. The Faeykin looked no paler than usual, which told him nothing. As for the desert folk, they seemed none the worse for wear, and though they did not share disparaging looks regarding the delay, Talmir could feel their attention on the west. It was like a need, throbbing and impossible to ignore.

  He met Creyath’s eyes as the Ember found his way back to them. He had drifted to the north, and in his tracks came Karin, hair tied back in a tail, sweat glistening like the obsidian caverns they had left behind.

  “How far?” he asked.

  Pevah had already turned back toward the west, while Ceth’s eyes had never left the place.

  “Not so very,” Pevah said. His voice was strained, though Talmir knew it was not fatigue. There was something in it that was not quite anger, though it carried threat. Was it fear?

  Now that he looked—really looked—Talmir could feel it. There was a buzz in the air that seemed to set the stars in their black curtain to shake and blur—and it was black now, with none of the blue or healthy lavender they had spied from the east. There was an intent to it, a power Talmir could not recognize even if some part of him found it familiar.

  And if that did not unsettle him enough, Creyath’s expression would have. The Second Keeper of Hearth wore a mask that did not reach his eyes, which flickered like guttering candles each time he followed the Sage’s line of sight. Talmir watched him in his periphery and noted the way the Ember looked to all around him, meeting gazes and sharing those confident, white smiles rather than risk a look toward the place they were heading—the place he could re
ach in half the time if he had the thought to.

  Talmir opened his mouth to speak but Pevah spoke first.

  “Rest will do us well,” he said, and Talmir did not take it as the insult some might. The Sage meant it, and he meant it for his own as well as for the Valleyfolk.

  “You are sure?” Talmir asked as Karin tossed him an uncertain look.

  “There is too much in it,” Pevah said, waving a hand. His sleeve billowed and revealed hands that ended in something close to the tapered black claws Talmir had witnessed in the caverns. “We must be steady.” He turned and nodded toward a few of his own. They took the meaning and split off from the main group, heading out to set their walking borders.

  Talmir sighed and nodded. “Make camp, and make it a close one.” They had brought nothing but bedrolls and what weapons they tucked within them, and Talmir heard the canvases roll out over the sand with a pleasant rasp, the metal of blade and pommel scraping the sand as his soldiers settled down to catch what sleep they could.

  Talmir stood atop the rise with Pevah and his champion, saying nothing. Creyath’s heat wafted among them like a sweltering breeze while Iyana stepped up between them, her green eyes putting out the only thing close to true light in a land grown strangely hazy.

  “Will it be wise to travel these lands by daylight?” Karin said, and Talmir noted his worry as the First Runner swept the horizon. There were no spurs nor shelves to shelter them, and the crags to the north seemed like pitted things, reminding him of the clay mounds that had housed a colony of spitting sand drakes.

  Pevah laughed, a humorless sound that had Ceth wincing.

  “Look behind you, First Runner,” he said. Karin did, and Talmir followed him. They looked out over the bedrolls and beyond the nomads who stood at the distant edges of their camp with sashes that hung still in a land that had lost its breath.

  At first, Talmir did not see anything that might cause untoward alarm. Then his mind filled in the details his eyes were missing. They had run some time, but the black spurs and gray slabs should not have been so far east as to be lost from sight. They were. There was nothing, near as Talmir could tell—at least, nothing but the strange flatness of a land they had run down as often as up throughout the night.

  “I don’t—”

  “We are west,” Pevah said by way of explanation. “Things are different here, among the Midnight Dunes. Things are … stopped.” His head tilted strangely as he said it, and Talmir felt suddenly dizzy.

  He took a step forward—though he could not have said why—and would have gone down in a dangerous slide had Iyana not grabbed him by the crook of the elbow and yanked him back. Ceth turned and then stepped before him.

  “This land has tricks,” he said. “It compels you to do things. Things that wouldn’t see you last the night.”

  “It is damned?” Creyath said, his voice containing a reedy note Talmir had never heard in it before.

  “Broken, more like,” Pevah said. “Ceth is partly right. There are tricks about, though they are not of the land but of the one who rests beneath it.” He nodded toward the horizon and Talmir squinted against the bloody glow that washed the stars out that way. “Take what rest you will, Captain Talmir.” The Sage turned toward them and smiled, though it was unsightly, now, his teeth having elongated, eyes filled with as much black as clay. He did not look at Iyana, as if ashamed to do so. “Do not worry on the coming of the dawn. It will not greet these lands so long as I live. I have broken its time and its way. It is a great sin. It is one I hold and one I would make again to keep what I’ve kept.”

  The sky pulsed behind him like a portent, or a silent storm, the blood draining to be replaced by a shocking purple that seemed to swell like an exhalation. Talmir felt himself timing his own breath with it.

  “What have you done here?” Iyana asked, her voice shaking.

  Pevah did not look at her but turned back toward the west.

  “Take rest,” he said. “It will not come again except against your will. And death is not always restful. I will try to keep you from that dark slumber. But you must listen to me in lands like these just as my children do. Even Ceth.”

  Talmir glanced at the northern Landkist, but the tall man remained motionless as his eyes, which took in the poisoned sky and imagined what lay beneath it.

  “Make sure the way is clear,” Pevah said. He spoke to Ceth, and the man stepped forward, hovering in the air for a moment before dropping to the flatter lands below.

  “There is a beauty to them,” Pevah added as Talmir stepped back toward the others. “The Dunes are tall as small mountains, the land about them sunken and soft, like snow.”

  “I wish I could say I looked forward to the sight,” Talmir said.

  He turned and made his own camp within the sparse one. As he lay down, he chose to look up rather than grace any false horizon in this strange land with his sight. Up, where the stars still shone in a curtain unaffected by the illusion of the east and whatever wall they had passed beyond, and not yet poisoned by whatever corruption the Sage had sown in the west.

  Iyana felt the strangeness settle before they had reached the soft ridge. The lands all around seemed bathed in a lavender shadow that had nothing to do with the absence of the sun or the presence of the moon and stars. Even they seemed somehow more distant than they had before, the light emitting a soft iridescence in place of the blue-white beams she had grown accustomed to in the caverns beneath the sand.

  She settled and found that the songs of the desert foxes who followed them relaxed her where before they had made her tense. She tried to spot them, but they were far out on the edges, keeping as far from the ridge Ceth had cleared as they could.

  She hadn’t meant to, but Iyana saw the tethers of all around her as fainter forms of their usual bright. She had not called to the Between, but it was here, closer than it might have been otherwise. And there was something else between it and within it, like a dark cousin dragging and twisting that other realm she was beginning to know as a part of her. It felt like an infection, and Iyana had no doubt where it was coming from.

  She blinked and rubbed at her temples, but still the tethers remained. They glowed brightest among the Landkist—Creyath and Sen chief among them—but all in the two companies that had become one trailed a thread that thrummed with expectation, anticipation—even dread.

  Iyana laid down to rest but did not find it easily. She twisted to see Pevah standing alongside Captain Talmir and Karin, their gazes fixed on the lowered shelf and the great mountains of sand that hung beyond the haze.

  After a time that felt longer to her than it truly was, sleep found her and embraced her like a long-lost friend. Before she followed those roads to their pleasant endings, she heard the remnants of a familiar purple song. As it bent and tumbled on airs the others could not hear—excepting Sen, perhaps—she felt it go red deep enough to appear as blood, old and crusted.

  Time was changed, here. She knew it even in the depths of dreaming—discovered it there, in a way. Tales and flights of fancy that should have wheeled by like comets before waking came clear and slow, unfolding with a patience that comforted before raising alarm. Iyana found herself trying to navigate through a net that seemed to build, one tale atop the next, and all of them with her at the unyielding center.

  She saw Karin ranging, catching glimpses of the great mounds to the west. She saw Ceth creeping in the basin, searching for caves and hollows from which ambush might arise. She saw Pevah in his true form; but while his black eyes were fixed on the west, his attention felt pulled in the opposite direction.

  The thought of the east brought up images of Linn, Kole, Jenk, Misha, Baas, and even Shifa the hound. She saw them cutting their way through a green land whose lushness covered a murderous intent and was made up of things designed to kill. There was a shadow following and finding, and a green spear of light that raged against the amber the Embers put off before merging into something like sun-yellow. She felt rot and smell
ed metal, saw the shadowed visages of great armored brutes and a swath of yellow that revealed the mane of one. And beyond them, farther east but not so far as Pevah’s thoughts, was a man sitting on a timber throne, full of fear and arrogance and planning. A man who was a Sage.

  There were twin voices calling out to her, and Iyana ignored them for a time, focused on making sense of the slow and disparate images some combination of dream and the Between showed her. One of the voices won out, and she recognized it as belonging to Mother Ninyeva.

  Iyana lost the thread she had been following like a moth to flame. There, floating in an ether her mind made, she saw the white hair and lined features of her teacher who had called this land her own. Her face, normally stern or playful, now seemed pulled and worried. Her body was indistinct, but she reached toward Iyana, her hand resolving more clearly with each passing beat.

  Iyana smiled and stepped toward her, but frowned as she saw Ninyeva shake her head, slow as regret. Iyana looked down and saw a red dagger clutched in her teacher’s hands. No. Not hers.

  “Fight,” she heard. “Fight, Iyana!”

  She felt something slam into her chest with the weight of a thrown boulder and tumbled down into a deep darkness before the light found her. She woke with a gasp, the lavender-red light of the western desert enveloping her along with a newfound confusion tinged with panic. But one thing was clear.

  She saw the red dagger lancing toward her, real and unimagined. She screamed and flung out a hand toward the one who wielded it—a painted savage whose face broke into a pained grimace as he raged against the unwilling bond she’d forged with his tether.

  All around, members of the caravan began to stir. But how could they be so slow in waking? How could this man have stolen through their nets?

  The song that curdled blood redoubled, and her assailant leaned his head back as if in rapture. The veins stood out on his neck and his eyes rolled back to reveal the whites lined with worms of sickly red. His teeth, filed to points, dripped with red, and Iyana knew she could either cut the thread she held or lose the fight, so strong was his pull and those who pulled him from afar.