“What is this?” Jes asked, whirling on Pevah. She stepped toward him and Ceth stepped in to block her path. Jes struck her arm toward the mountainous dunes. “Explain, Sage! Explain your lands!”
Iyana thought to say something but found that no words came. Mial and Ket moved up on either side of Jes and even Creyath turned toward them, his amber eyes roving between each set and settling on Ceth last. If the Northman noticed the gaze of an Ember upon him, he did not seem to mind.
“It is an awakening,” Pevah said, his voice coming out calmer than the growl it had become. Iyana could not see his face in full behind the folds of his blood-red hood, but she thought she saw the glint of a fang in the dusky light. “It is my failure and it is doom.”
“They’re killing each other,” Ket said.
It might have sounded foolish or needless to say, but no one seemed to think so, not even Pevah, who only nodded, teeth grinding, blood leaking from fresh cuts in his palms he’d made himself. Ceth looked at him worriedly and then back at Jes and the Valley soldiers, even Iyana. His eyes verged on gray more than the blue they had been, now.
“Some victory,” Creyath said.
“For us, or them?” Sen asked.
“Does it matter?”
Pevah looked as if he were about to answer, and then the vibrations began. Iyana had to catch herself on Ket’s arm, the young soldier helping her to steady. She blinked out the sight of the Between and tried to fight the waves of dizziness that assailed her, combining with the newfound tremors they all fought. The sands below them shifted and bounced, and Iyana had the impression that they were merely mites on the surface of some giant’s dusty table.
The Dunes pulsed and though she could no longer see the tendrils of the song that drove the Pale Men to sacrifice and murder of their own, she knew it was there, compelling them to rend each other limb from limb just as it compelled the lands below to crack, bend and threaten breaking.
Compelled what was below.
The crown of the four conjoined dunes spilled along with the bodies of those atop it—the fighters and the dead—and soon the glowing jewels for peaks formed a singular, misshapen mass that oozed with a bright and wet redness that made Iyana want to retch. The slope was now dark with the blood of those atop, their pale forms tumbling and slipping, some sinking into pools the blood of their brothers and sisters had made in the miniature valleys that spread out before them.
“Why?” The voice was earnest and tired in a way Iyana finally thought she understood. The speaker was the yellow-haired northerner she thought Ceth counted as mate, if not lover. Martah’s face was splotched with blood that wouldn’t dry for the heat below her skin. Her lips were cracked and dry, her eyes quivering in the sunken caves exhaustion had made of them. “Pevah. Why? Why do they—”
“Because the only thing that calls a lord of death is death itself,” he said, voice flat, emotionless, though his face told a different story. “Blood signals life, but its smell can only mean its ending. He is trapped beneath the bonds I’ve set him in, his mind caught in the slowness I’ve made. Enough blood, and he’ll remember. Enough death, and he’ll rise. I remember his like. I remember him as he was. This was always going to happen so long as the crones got their way.”
“How did they know?” Iyana asked. “The Blood Seers, I mean. How could they have known? You said they sought the power of the Embers buried beneath.”
“Their followers, maybe,” Pevah said, casting a sidelong glance at the celebrating warriors whose paint had begun to run with the heat of their excitement. “But I think I was blind. I think this one,” he pointed toward the towering mounds of sand and ruined flesh, “was smarter than I thought.”
“How so?” Creyath asked. It was a strange image, the lot of them gathered around Pevah like children waiting on the telling of some tale they wanted to frighten them without it being real. But this was real, and its effects were plain before them, bright and dark at once and impossible not to see.
“He has been whispering things in the dark, I think,” Pevah said, a wry smile creeping onto his face that might even have signified grudging respect. Iyana shook her head, but Creyath merely nodded and turned back toward the Dunes, a rare breeze sweeping down from the north to blow his black braids in a swaying dance.
“The Night Lords are more than kings,” Pevah said, his red-brown eyes focused ahead. He no longer chanted. No longer tried to change the time atop the crest. He was saving what energy he had left, and Iyana held no doubt what for.
“In the World Apart, they are the rulers of lands and black waters that stretch unending,” he said. Creyath regarded him with a keener interest than the rest, which is to say his eyes burned brighter than his arrows ever had. “They are ageless titans, manifestations of whatever nameless horrors and long-ago travesties caused them to be. Perhaps another world such as ours, beautiful in one time and made sick with war in another. Perhaps they were kings themselves, or heroes. Landkist, if all worlds have them as well. It could be they were made by some … folly, or another.”
His voice caught on that and Iyana seized on it and filed it away.
His shoulders sagged slightly. “Or perhaps they simply are, and perhaps their being has no deeper meaning beyond the purpose we’ve assigned to them. After all, what does one do with power like theirs and no soul to guide it?”
“Destroy,” Ceth said.
Pevah did not respond, nor did he nod or give any indication he had heard. Still, it was plain for all to see that Ceth had spoken true, and Iyana saw more than one furtive glance back toward the east, which Pevah laughed away and then seemed shamed to have done so.
“You speak as if you’ve seen the place,” Sen said.
Pevah did look at him, then, and Iyana saw anger replaced by a flash of fear. She had not known the Sage of the Red Waste for long, but she had known him long enough to recognize the look as rare. Judging by the effect it had on his followers, she was right to take some of that fear for herself.
“We need to stop it.” Ceth said it lightly, as if he knew the response would disappoint him. His hands were no longer balled into fists, but hung limp at his sides. He seemed so very tired, and Iyana had the urge to ease it. She held herself back.
“Plenty of blood painting those mountains, now,” Pevah said. “I’ll not add more of yours to the pyre.”
Ceth sighed and it sounded like the lot of them sighed with him, Iyana included.
“I have seen many things,” Pevah said, catching as many glances as he could and holding those that lingered. “Things not meant for me or any other.” He looked as if he would say more, but the witches’ song pitched and rolled like a ship in a wayward sea and he did not waste the effort warring with it.
“The Night Lord comes,” Pevah said. And that was that.
It sounded like something close to acceptance, but it hinged too far on inevitability for Iyana. Her mind raced over the implications and the possibilities. She thought of how they might stop the killing and thus the raising of the beast below, but the song was the key. She knew it in her bones, and she knew the only hope of stopping it was a league or more away, hunting the singers in whatever shallow darkness they hid.
Karin fought against the memory, feeling the sting of another blade as it made a hole in his shirt and the skin beneath. One had climbed his back and snatched him by the hair. He bit down and launched her over, feeling to make sure his neck was untouched. He whirled and lashed out in all directions, feeling weak but angry enough to cast it off. He went down on one knee and shook with the need to rise.
And then he saw Talmir Caru walking amid that dark horde, the Bronze Star that hung on his chest glowing with a light it made—a light that was not borrowed from the sun or moon or stars, nor reflected from a burning pit.
“The fire will never come back for you,” Talmir said. He walked toward the eldest, heedless of the other crones who bared their teeth and grasped for him. And Karin saw that they were not there. Not real
ly. He knew it as the work of the poisons they had given to him, and though he saw the same cuts and gashes leaking along the captain’s arms and neck and scarred cheeks, Talmir Caru was unharmed and undaunted.
“It will not cleanse you from this World because we will do it first,” he said, and now Karin glimpsed the first of fear he had seen on any of the witches’ lined faces as she crouched in the deeper darkness.
“Keep your fire, you folk who would name yourselves ‘Ember,’” she said with the voices she’d stolen. “We’ve no need of its lie!”
The chamber burst into light that only flame could make, the black pit in the center flaring to a blinding sun that had Karin reeling. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, and it was a lucky thing, as he felt the bite of stone and the dull, stinging ring of it greeting the bone of his arm. Not all of them were spent, then, and as he tossed the latest aside the rest fell on him and away from the blinding, glowing pit in the center.
The song seemed to tear itself apart, making a wind rise where before there had been only musty stillness and sticky death. It whipped the yellow flames into a frenzy and scorched the bodies nearest the pit as others crawled away, screaming and raging and seeking a place to put it.
Karin fought against the remaining crones who advanced on him, and the discordant song flooded his ears and infected him to the marrow. But now it had no hold on him, and he found the strength they had taken. He found it in the image of Sarise A’zu and he made her fire his own. He leapt atop them and dashed their heads upon the stone one by one, ignoring the scores he received from those he had left to kill, and all the while Talmir’s silver blade went to work before the miniature sun that hung in a chamber lit like dawn.
He fought for what seemed an eternity. His skin burned but did not peel as he wrestled, thrashed and rolled near the sloped pit. The song became a scream that sounded with a thousand voices—innocents taken from their mortal coils, the voices stolen from the Pale Men and used to lead them—and the noise and pain of it stole all senses from him but for those he needed to complete his dark task.
And complete it he did.
Karin stood on wavering legs. The fire had died down, and in the cool breeze that rushed in from the south the blood on his hands dried to a cracking paste, as if it was reluctant to leave him or absolve him of the guilt he did not yet feel at killing the creatures.
He looked beyond the pit and the naked, pale bodies strewn around it, none of them whole after the work Talmir’s blade had done. Talmir stood with his back to Karin, and though he could not see her, he knew the eldest of the crones had flattened herself against the opposite wall. Now that the fire was dimmed, Karin could see the cave picking up and reflecting the bronze light Talmir’s medal sent out. There was some magic in it after all, and Karin marveled despite his pain and the discordant, wrathful wailing that tried to lay him low.
Karin circled the edge of the pit, holding a hand to his brow to keep the throbbing ache from overtaking him, keeping his eyes clear and dry lest he be thrown back into the depths of some illusion or truth of the past he need not remember here and now.
He saw her now, the witch who had been so brazen and brave. She cowered at the feet of the Captain of Hearth, her nose mere inches from the tip of that silver blade Karin had seen do its work on some of the stoutest warriors in the Valley core back when the tribes therein were less than allies. In the place of fear, he saw only hate, and it was a potent thing.
She rose before Talmir’s steady, merciless gaze and raised her chin toward him. She opened her mouth to speak, and in a movement faster than a hot-blooded slash from an Ember in full heat Talmir parted her head from her boney shoulders.
The skull landed on the black rock with a crack and rolled to land between the two men. The song ceased. Karin fell to his knees in a relief that was almost overwhelming in its peace and Talmir did the same, the two panting as if they had risen from the deepest depths of Last Lake, clawing for breath they did not know they had needed. Karin wondered how long they could have survived in the thick of that dark storm. As he stared at the milky red eyes of the witch’s head, he was glad not to find out.
She gasped. Karin would not have believed it if Talmir’s curses hadn’t confirmed it. The Bronze Star that had dimmed brightened once more, stinging Karin’s eyes. The captain stood as the witch’s head worked its jaw, eyes rolling to expose the whites. He pulled his sword up with him, the metal scraping on the stone like a proclamation, an impending doom.
Spittle and blood leaked from her open maw and dripped from those yellowed teeth. She had no throat to make the sounds, but they came out anyway.
“He is coming,” the witch’s head said. “Coming to finish—”
And before Talmir could do it for them both, Karin found an errant stone and brought it down with a crack and squelch to end it.
“We’ll give him your best,” he said, breathless.
The silence that filled the void the witches left behind was almost overpowering in its magnitude. There was an emptiness to the place, now, and Karin felt the weight of it just as he felt the burn of the poisons in his blood. His vision was blurred, but he had enough of his senses to know he was in no mortal danger. Not now that the crones were dead.
It was fitting, the way they had left them. Fitting for what the witches had done and fitting for the small measure of satisfaction the men had taken from their killing, even if they would never give voice to it.
Still, there was an ache separate from the poisons and the cuts; apart from the thrum the song had left behind and the exhaustion that hit him in full now that he had stopped moving. It speared his heart and threatened to rip it out, and Karin collapsed in a well of his own tears. The salt rivers ran freely, water he did not know he had left spilling onto the still-hot stones to sizzle and steam. His whole form shook with the agony of her loss, as if he felt it now just as he had for the first time. Just as Kole had.
He felt a hand on his back as Talmir knelt to offer comfort.
“I was spared the brunt of it,” Talmir said as Karin emptied it out, feeling dizzy and lighter for it. He regarded the captain and traced a path down to the cut of bronze that stuck to the pink sweat on his chest.
“It seems Sister Piell put some magic in it after all,” Karin said, wiping away the salt that had already begun to crystallize like one of the quartz pillars below the sands.
Talmir smiled. “Perhaps she is what this lot once were, before they went wrong. Before they … soured.” He thought about spitting but held it in, and the two of them looked out toward the south, hoping against hope.
“You’ve done something here, Karin,” Talmir said.
The song was dead and the foxes were already streaking back over the dunes, heading south. They moved with a purpose celebration held no part in, and Karin nodded despite the dread he still felt and the fresh pain of a heart broken all over again.
“You seem set on waiting.”
Sen addressed Pevah as the latter watched the massacre continue atop the Dunes, which were now slick with red and black and all manner of pieces that used to be men. The Sage’s eyes were redder now, and they flickered toward Sen as if he were an errant fly buzzing on the borders of attention.
“What would you have me do?” Pevah asked. The question seemed to take Sen aback. The Faeykin’s mouth worked, but he ultimately settled for a frown. He turned back toward the north, his eyes tracing the same ridges Iyana’s did—intent for signs of Talmir and Karin, or perhaps something worse that heralded their end—before settling on the painted warriors who had changed from milling to pacing on the flats separating the one group from the other.
Iyana watched Pevah just as Ceth and the red- and gray-sashes did. Her own people shifted from foot to foot, unsure whether to stow bows and blades or bare them fresh and full. They looked to Creyath now more than any other, and the Second Keeper had adopted much the same expression as the Sage he stood beside, both staring unerringly west.
The ol
d man was buzzing. Iyana might have put it down to a trick the dark song played out in the contours of her mind, but the longer she stared the more certain she became. He was building to something, preparing in thought and in other ways she could not see even if he appeared to be standing still. Waiting, as Sen said.
Still, whatever the old man was playing at, Iyana was having trouble seeing where they fit in. The Sage did not seem to think they could defeat what was coming any more than they could stop it doing so in the first place. Why, then, did he not ask them to leave? Why did he not compel them?
Iyana shivered at the thought. Could it be that he knew himself doomed, and did not want to meet his end alone? Could it be that he knew running was futile, and that there was no escape for them now?
Or was there something else building below the surface? Below that lined face that should have looked even older. Below that blood-red robe and the striking silver silk she sometimes glimpsed at the hems. Could there be something of hope left in the Sage of the Red Waste? And could they have to do with it?
As she thought on it, Iyana found her gaze drawn to Ceth. The Landkist had expended much of his energy in the melee that had amounted to nothing on the slope—nothing more than an aid for the macabre game the Blood Seers were playing in their dusky caves under the forever night. He breathed shallow and slow, but his eyes flickered back and forth between Dunes, enemies, and the man he might’ve considered a king.
The ground shook and it sounded like rage.
Iyana couldn’t help but glance around to see how plain her fear was. As it stood, she saw the same look reflected in the rest. Ket stood with the more experienced blades between them and the painted warriors. If anything, he looked the least cowed—a sign of inexperience more than bravery. Jes and Mial, stoic as they came even if they were two generations separated, stood very still. The only members of the twin parties who seemed undisturbed were Ceth’s Northmen. If anything, Iyana thought there was an eagerness about them.
The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3) Page 43
