The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3)

by Steven Kelliher

  Pevah stayed him with an upraised hand. “Save your strength, Faey,” the Sage said, his lips parting to reveal those angled teeth Iyana had never wanted to see again. His eyes flashed from red-brown to black and then back again. Iyana found herself looking up. She thought for a moment she could see filaments streaking above them, tiny threads like webs catching moonlight. The stuff the song carried, or the stuff that carried it.

  “Why time, Pevah?” she asked. Creyath had come over at the Sage’s distress, and both the Ember and Sen shook with tension as the Sage fought with whatever assailed him. This was a battle within, but Iyana had never been one to ignore an impression. She knew she had to keep him here, keep him present.

  Some of the color came back into his eyes. He glanced from the battle on the Dunes to her, beads of sweat glistening in the strange dream-light.

  “We are each a slave to time,” he said. “We are beholden to it. We think it constant, but it is less a rule and more a river.” His voice nearly broke and she saw his legs quiver. The Pale Men surged forward, stronger now, and then they slowed and Ceth and the warriors of the desert threw them back and cut them down all over again.

  One of the soldiers called out a warning and Iyana whirled to see a few of the painted warriors had come closer. The Valley soldiers spread their double line wider, with more than a stride between each of them. For now, the savages remained rooted, but Iyana could see their desire to fight. What sort of a figure must Pevah be to them? What sort of hateful place did he hold in their hearts and minds, these desert children who had been birthed along the red veins of the molten Mother below and given the blood of their own for sustenance, along with whatever dark tales and bloody songs the Seers sang to them?

  Pevah did not look to the tribesmen. He paid them less mind than a nipping fly. His eyes were to the west. Iyana thought he watched Ceth and the others paint the Dunes a darker shade of the purple and black that made up their sides until she saw that his eyes were focused higher up, fixed on that glowing and spiked crown. The crown of a king. Or a lord.

  “The World Apart is a place of chaos,” Pevah said, speaking more calmly than he had before. He breathed at even intervals, as if timing his breath with whatever stuff he put out to keep his warriors unburdened. It must be strange, to fight against one’s own magic, however long ago he’d laid it here. Iyana wondered if it was a part of him, still, and if that was why he could not use his power as readily or as mightily as some of the other Sages were said to.

  She nearly laughed at the absurdity of the thought—that this Sage could seem weaker than the rest because he did not hurl bolts of lightning or command legions of monsters. That he could seem somehow weaker than the champion who flew and leapt over the sands, weightless one moment and heavy as a collapsing star the next as he became the weapon his Sage needed him to be.

  “What is the opposite of chaos, Iyana Ve’Ran?” Pevah asked, as if they two were sitting alone in the deep, soft-lit chamber that housed the Everwood tree—the only one left in the west, most likely. As if there were not glowing mountains of sand or legions of pale horrors attempting to crest them. As if there was not a song of death infecting the air for leagues around—infecting all who listened to it against their will, bending them toward killing or the fear of dying.

  “Order,” she said.

  The soldiers of the caravan glanced over nervously, but kept their blades pointed toward the northwest. The Pale Men moved as one mind, unerring and forward. Up and into the trench they dug deeper, one that now ran with the slick lifeblood of their brothers and sisters who had been murdered or granted mercy.

  “And what is time made of, if not order?” Pevah nearly smiled as he said it. There was still a strain on him, like a great pull, and from close by. His face had gone from bronze to ashen gray, and Iyana knew it was no trick of the light.

  Sen gasped and Iyana turned toward him, thinking the warriors had had enough of waiting and had made for them after all. Instead, the Faeykin regarded Pevah with a shocked expression, looking from him to the mounds of sand that now seemed to buzz with a latent and building rush that threatened to burst.

  “That’s how you did it,” Sen said. Creyath’s eyes flashed with an orange brightness that had Iyana blinking. “That’s how you trapped him. Trapped the Night Lord. Those dunes,” he pointed in a way that reminded Iyana of a child. “You made them, didn’t you? It’s not sand that lies beneath them. Your ward is time itself. The Dunes are merely the armor you’ve coated it with.”

  “The desert takes back its own,” Pevah said with a smirk. He seemed proud and sad all at once. “These dunes are new things.” He tilted his chin. “New compared to them.” He nodded toward Ceth, who cut down another pair of horrors with fists gone red as the rest of him. Even the gray-sashes were difficult to tell apart now, nothing but their complexions separating them from the desert folk they fought alongside. Some had slowed in a way that had nothing to do with time or its strange bending, and Iyana guessed these to be the ones who had stood at the crest when they had first arrived.

  “Chaos cannot be controlled,” Pevah said, shaking his head. “No matter what my once-brother may have believed.” He spat into the sand, but there was little in it. “He cannot still believe it.” He nearly turned toward the east, as if expecting the enemy of the World—the enemy of the Emberfolk and all Iyana loved—to come swooping on darker winds than those that stirred about them now where before there had only been dead air and dreadful music.

  “No,” Pevah continued. “Chaos is not a thing to be controlled. It can only be guided so long. It can only be contained—trapped—so long. Chaos is a thing of fury, and fury is a thing of speed. It is a thing built of quick memory and long, simmering anger.” He smiled again, though he seemed to droop some, to fold in on himself just a bit. He seemed older, now. “And so I beat it the only way I could. I slowed it down. I slowed it to a point just above stopping. I broke time, and with it, I broke the fury that drove the beast.”

  He looked up, raising his left hand and running it through the red-purple filaments only he, Iyana and Sen could see. “This is a song of quickening. Of undoing. It is breaking the wards, and in so doing, the bonds that hold the beast. It will remember its purpose and its rage, its fury and its power. It will remember me, and everything I fought to protect, and once it slays me, it will seek out the one who fought alongside me.” He looked to Iyana. “The one your Landkist slew in the south.”

  “The White Crest,” Iyana said. It seemed impossible, these figures from stories made real, and all their deeds with them. She knew her sister had fought the White Crest, but that had been a shadow and a corruption of the proud, god-like figure who was said to have wielded the skies themselves. That was the one who had slain the Night Lords that had come against the Valley. That was the one Pevah had fought alongside when he had donned a different name. A name more red and bloody.

  “The very same,” Pevah said without humor.

  “This was the site of a great battle,” Creyath said as much as asked.

  Pevah nodded. “Great is a relative term.” He swept his gaze in all directions but east. He seemed to have given up whatever battle he had fought with the faraway Seers and their drifting, poisoned song. He was saving whatever he had left for something worse. For the inevitable. Iyana felt her shoulders slump even as the Sage’s seemed buoyed beyond all sense. Her heart beat faster, and the aching the song had brought against her skull faded, replaced by a numbness.

  “You fought him here, didn’t you?” Iyana asked. Pevah regarded her quizzically, his eyes regaining some of their former light, though there was always a bit of blood in them. Always a bit of the past, and whatever had come with it. “The Eastern Dark. You fought him and his Night Lords.”

  “Just the one, at the time,” he said, nodding toward the dunes she now knew to be a prison of his making. “The greatest,” he smirked, “but still just the one. My brother fought three to protect your Valley home. Three lesser he
slew, but still; three is a greater number than one, and he’d never have let me forget it had he …” he drifted along with his wandering thoughts. It seemed the past had the same hold on one of the mighty, long-lived Sages as it did on any other, mortal or otherwise. Perhaps more so.

  He looked to the south, his eyes seeming to span a distance farther even than Linn’s as he imagined the Valley and the great battle that had waged there. A battle Iyana had come up hearing tales of, even if she never truly believed them.

  “The Eastern Dark came here to end our plotting,” Pevah said. “He came to end us, I think. But we gave him a good accounting—far better than he had any right to expect. He was craven then, but not without tricks. He pulled his trump card: the Night Lord we fought for days that bled into a week.

  “We trapped him. I trapped him, but the White Crest missed his mark. My dark brother fled back to the east, earning a bit more of his name. He opened one more rift that nearly killed him to admit the other three: the princes to this king.” He shook his head. “Such a place it must be,” he said in awe. “Such a place.”

  “The World Apart?” Iyana asked, appalled. He seemed taken aback by her reaction, but then his look changed to one of sympathy, even pity. She hated that even more.

  He looked back to the dunes. The battle seemed still to be going in their favor, though even Ceth had slowed some. He was blood-soaked and haggard, and Pevah looked pained to see him so.

  The amber glow atop the dunes began to pulse with something close to a heartbeat, and the purple sky above matched it, alternating its rhythm. It was like a nightmare, yet one so beautiful Iyana could not look away. The soldiers of the caravan lowered their weapons and raised their eyes, and even the painted warriors did the same, exposing the whites of their eyes.

  “The time that appears so slow to you is magnified within,” Pevah said. He indicated the two-breasted line of pale, lurching figures as they moved with agonizing slowness toward the maelstrom the desert warriors made. “It is a bleed one hundred times faster than what is below. One thousand times.”

  “Then Ceth cannot lose,” Iyana said, her voice sounding pleading. “They cannot lose. They are unencumbered.”

  Another sad smile. A look of resignation, and a voice to match it.

  “Go to them,” he said, nodding toward Ket, Jes and Mial. He met Creyath’s amber gaze. “Please. Get them out. Bring them back here. Bring them east, back the way we’ve come.”

  Creyath hesitated and the others watched him, unwilling to make a move without the Second Keeper’s example.

  “But the wards!” Iyana shouted. “They’ll dig them up. They’ll break them, and the spell with them.”

  Pevah was shaking his head before she finished. She thought of her father’s face she rarely recalled. He often held that look, just as Linn had after him.

  “There is nothing to defend,” he said with a certainty she could not dispute. She felt despair.

  “Then why have we come?”

  “Because I was wrong,” he said. And with each passing beat, he became less sad and less afraid, she thought. He began to grow into the shell he donned as if it were armor. “Whatever they have come to do, they have done,” he said. “The beast is woken. It is coming. It is only a matter of time, I think.”

  “But how?”

  Even as she said it, Creyath looped his bow across his shoulders and drew the Everwood blade that hung at his side.

  “Blood,” Pevah said. “Blood is the key, and our side is making the most of it. They cannot undo the wards, but the Night Lord can. He is strong. He only needs to remember it.”

  “He is not the only one,” Creyath said, and with that, he sped toward the Midnight Dunes, his leaping strides taking him across the expanse even faster than Ceth’s.

  Iyana switched her gaze to the painted warriors. They watched Creyath and the Valley soldiers like hawks on hares, but they did not move. Their bloodshot eyes swept back and focused on them once more—Iyana and Sen—but Pevah most of all. It seemed to Iyana they had come to witness something, or else to stop it. And whatever it was, it began and ended with the Sage of the Red Waste.

  “Don’t listen!” Talmir screamed as they hit the staggered line, but Karin did not need to be told.

  The witches’ song issued forth from the cave mouth like the sordid breath of some great beast—dark, bloody and without hope. It pounded his ears and assailed his soul, but Karin was a man of focus, just like the Captain of Hearth who fought beside him. He kept his blade angled along with his attention and gave himself fully to the fight, allowing the killing music to flood his ears but ignoring everything else the song held.

  He cut one down—a large male with blue paint covering his face and chest—by slashing him across the neck and then tucked into a roll to dodge a boney scythe that made for his. He came up scattering sand and raised an arm to block another blow that did not fall as one of the desert foxes latched onto the muscled limb that sent it.

  Karin was as good at killing as any other. He was not particularly good at fighting. Still, he had learned one thing above all else when it came to living to see the end of such a wild, bloody exchange: movement is key. And so he ran, ducked, dove and skimmed, keeping his boots a constant blur along with the short blade he held as often in one fist as the other and as often in the air between them. He heard the snarls of the red foxes just as he heard the even more animalistic sounds of the men and women they fought. He heard the grunts and sharp inhalations of received wounds just as he heard the short hisses of Talmir Caru, who was as efficient with his movements as Karin was erratic.

  There was a beauty to the way the Captain of Hearth fought. Karin had seen him do it in the Valley core, when he had faced down an army of Corrupted. He had even been on-hand to witness his fight with the Landkist Brega Cohr. Talmir’s sword was merely an extension of himself. It wasn’t the way he moved his hands or tucked his chin just as it wasn’t the way he lunged or stabbed or cut and slashed. It was in the feet, and though he kept to one small pocket within the melee he soon commanded the lion’s share of their enemies’ focus, with the painted warriors converging on the silver blade and the Bronze Star that swung behind it.

  They had forgotten the fox in the wolves’ midst, and Karin smiled despite himself and despite the circumstances. He charged back in and slid to dodge another wild swing as he was remembered, cutting the bands that held up the legs of two and driving the point in between the shoulder blades of another. His victim fell to her knees without a sound but Karin was forced to spin away, earning another slash for his efforts, the sweat mixing with the blood and making it run faster and slicker as it warmed the underside of his arm and made small rivers down his side.

  He danced away, using the darting foxes for cover. The warriors had killed half a dozen, but twice that number remained, and these fought with a savageness reserved for those denizens of the World who fought without the use of blade or worked metal. Their weapons were tooth and claw, and nothing borrowed from the dead they left behind. They leapt and feinted, bit and spat and tumbled. They fought in singles and pairs and small packs, leaping atop any of the Bloody Screamers who lost their footing, and their deaths were not quiet or quick when granted by the desert’s own as they were when Karin or Talmir did the work.

  A wave of nausea threatened to overtake him and Karin whirled to see that he had drifted very close to the black mouth of the cave. It loomed over him, suspended above the black ledge that rose above his head. A yip had him turning back and a brute of a male—bleeding from a dozen cuts and one gash down the center that could only have come from Talmir’s blade—barreled into him.

  Karin managed to hook an arm and spin, using a trick whose source he did not remember as he twisted and sent them both slamming into the sheer, smooth and unyielding rock face. They went down in a tangle, but the red-toothed warrior was the stronger. He came up punching as Karin tried to kick him off, and they rolled at the base of a slope, tucked between the shifting
sands and the corner of the rocky shelf.

  They traded blows and curses meant more for themselves than each other, and Karin knew he was not the stronger nor the more clever with his hands. A bright and lancing light had him looking toward the top of the slope as bloody hands clamped tight around his throat, and he recognized the moon sliver as none other than Talmir’s blade. The captain leapt over and spun back, fighting a sliding retreat as a trio of warriors fell on him and a pack of red foxes on them.

  Karin tried to cry out, but nothing emerged but a dry and croaking gasp. He saw more warriors pushed back by the pack; one tumbled toward them with frightening speed, sending sand and spray in all directions as the pack gave him up in search of fresh game. Karin saw red with black borders, but he also saw white. Gleaming, moon-washed white in the form of a boney knife the tumbling man had dropped.

  With a heave and a bit of the fire he had never had the gift of, he managed to dislodge the brute and rolled over, scrambling up the sliding dune and hacking as he did. He felt a tight grip on his ankle and kicked with both feet as he reached desperately for the length of white, which teetered but did not slide. He gave it up as out of reach, but as he was pulled back, he dug his hands into the sides of the slope and pulled, digging a miniature trough and causing a smaller spill within the larger.

  The desert that had been unkind to them since arriving gave its first reward as the white bone blade joined the cascade Karin had begun, sliding and skipping into his waiting hand as the brute climbed him using his pants and buckle for purchase. As he felt a rough hand greet his trailing black hair, Karin spun and drove the point of it up through the hollow in the warrior’s jaw.

  Heat splashed into his eyes, mixing with the sand there and causing him to cry out. He heard Talmir heaving and grunting more now as he fought close to him, felt the weight of his attacker leave as he keeled over. He slashed at air with the blade he’d kept and came up in a scramble, feeling the conjured wind of the melee pass him in quick cuts and dying gusts as the red foxes streaked past.