The Midnight Dunes (The Landkist Saga Book 3)

by Steven Kelliher

  “Then you should make them count,” Pevah said, direct and uncompromising. Iyana shot him a look that was ignored. The Sage looked from the ruined dunes and the black shadow atop them to the painted warriors in the north. He had a killing look and a provoking one. Iyana had the sudden realization that he very much wanted the fight that he had so staunchly avoided for seasons that had bled into years. His wards had been broken and it seemed to her that some of the strength he had forgotten was returned, and with it some of what had given him his name.

  Still, there was enough of the old man she had known remaining, and that was the figure she chose to look to as he began to issue commands that somehow sounded like an old man’s gentle suggestions. He spoke to those readying weapons they would finally be tasked with using against those warriors who had betrayed these lands. Sharps against sharps. Muscle against muscle as a Sage and his Landkist prepared to battle a demon the likes of which Iyana had never imagined.

  She only had to discover where healers and tricksters like she and Sen fit into the coming madness.

  “Our friends will come … presently,” Pevah said, and on they came, shouting and hollering like mad dogs foaming at the mouth. They ran and leapt and sprinted, intent on the Sage and his followers. Intent to give glory to a thing that could never know it and could never appreciate its attempt, or so she thought.

  “Ceth,” Pevah said, and the northern Landkist began to move between them, heading for the front of the line where Ket and the other swordsmen and spear-wielders stood. “Ceth, no.” The Landkist turned toward Pevah, who was looking back at the purple-eyed titan of nightmare. Those red eyes turned back, and Iyana saw the regret in them, and the fear.

  “You must draw him off,” Pevah said. “Draw his aim and his fury, his rage and foolishness. Draw his ire and in so doing, draw his death.” Ceth nodded, his feet changing direction as quickly as his will, which was as dauntless as any Iyana had known.

  The painted warriors were getting closer, carried on the backs of their screams that mixed desperation with wanton need. Iyana swallowed, but in the place of the fear she had felt moments before a strange sort of calm enveloped her. She felt a warmth that had nothing to do with Creyath’s flames, and then she noted Sen standing beside her, noticed the glow her other Sight picked up as his tether brushed against her own. She looked up at him and he smiled back down before stepping toward the line of blades facing the north.

  “We stand here.” Pevah extended his palms toward the Night Lord and the crumbled dunes, toward Ceth’s back as the Landkist drifted farther away, his strides lengthening, pace quickening. The purple fire in the Night Lord’s eye-pits watched him approach dispassionately at first, and then with a hatred Iyana could not know but felt all the same.

  Ceth’s walk became a trot, which turned to a sprint that was faster than Iyana had seen him move—faster than Kole and faster than any beast she had yet seen. There was an inhalation, like the west itself were taking a deep breath before a plunge, and Ceth launched himself skyward with that strength that belied the weightlessness that would follow.

  A great black fist and all its claws swung toward him with shocking speed, and Iyana thought for certain the hero of the deserts would be shattered then and there. Instead, the arm slowed as if passing through a mire, and Iyana recognized the indrawn breath as the work of Pevah, whose arms shook with the effort, palms pulsing with a blur that matched the one still coating the Night Lord’s form.

  Ceth flipped up and over the great arm that was thicker at the wrist than he was at the waist. He caught currents she couldn’t feel and slowed only a little when he hit some of the time Pevah had bent. He tumbled over the inner side of the beast’s arm and fell like a flitting leaf below that lavender stare, landing with a shock that formed a crater in the sand and rocked the Night Lord back on its haunches with surprise more than force.

  Another roar, and this one scattered the wispy clouds that had begun to form with a strange haste. Pevah panted. He was drenched in sweat, and the Night Lord’s next blow nearly took Ceth’s head from his shoulders. The one behind it would have had Pevah not slowed it again, moving time like it was a blade through a pool of his own making.

  The Night Lord brought both its palms down and made craters of its own that tripled Ceth’s height in depth, and the Landkist streaked away like a leaf on the wind. The titan leaned forward like a cat worrying at a rodent’s hovel and let forth a scream that contained the sounds of all those who had died to make it remember. The white sand burned with purple fire whose cold and heat Iyana could feel from a distance.

  “Ember,” Pevah said, his voice an entreaty and a warning.

  “Ready …” Mial droned out another warning, and Iyana loosed a gasp as the painted warriors slammed into their line with savage abandon.

  The melee was wet and violent and too quick to last long, and Iyana fell more from the shock of it than any true danger. Sen waded into the fray without a weapon to his name and the red- and gray-sashes meted out more steel and iron and cut obsidian than they accepted as the armor of Hearth protected those Iyana had grown to know on the journey from home.

  She rolled onto her knees and scrambled up, dodging a sharpened spur of bone and then the falling form of one of the painted men, who died gurgling with one of Jes’s knives embedded in its throat. She stood and held her breath as she came face-to-face with a frozen and colorful visage that mixed terror with rage, and saw the telltale glow of green as Sen held the warrior fast with a rope none but she could see.

  The warrior struggled and strained and Iyana was caught in indecision. She felt a cold length of steel slide into her open hand—a gift from a passing nomad. She looked down at it and hated to see the quiver in her hand, a shaking that betrayed her as a child among killers, and when she looked up she hated even more to see the fear in the warrior’s eyes change to passionate hate below the blue and red paint. Iyana took the look as a condemnation.

  And then the painted face exploded in a shower of red and white, and Iyana saw Sen grimace behind his own shaking hands.

  “I couldn’t hold her,” he said, his voice a mix of regret and accusation. He turned to freeze another to make it easier for the rest to kill and Iyana saw Ket, Mial and the others streak before her like wraiths she only dimly recognized. She had lost the blade in the slick, and she had lost the white of her skin to spotted red. Her face was already cracking with the paste the death had left behind, and when she turned back toward Pevah she saw that the Sage stood behind his glowing Ember facing a field of purple fire.

  Iyana watched the dream play out behind a half-drowned mind that wanted to fade away into a sleep that might see her forget. She saw Ceth moving like a falcon against the wind, his gray cloak and short white hair streaking like a star before a dark god that broke the trails he passed, carving bits of real with the unreal, struggling against the bonds that held it.

  “Ember …” Pevah drew out again, and this time Creyath stood. The Ember set his shaft of sunlight to that black bow and drew on corded muscles that matched the grain. He let loose with a crack and pop, and the meteor carved a bowed path through the lavender field of flame, breaking the duel between Ceth and the Night Lord and streaking straight for the beast’s chest.

  It exploded with a flare that lit the western sky and made the night day, and when Iyana lowered her arm from before her eyes she saw that the Night Lord had done the same. Bits of black fell from the pit the missile had made in its limb, and the purple eyes took in the new scar with a smolder that stank of disbelief. It was delicious to her, and she savored it.

  The next roar threatened to move the stars, and Iyana wondered if they could hear it to the south along the Fork and atop the battlements of Hearth. She turned and saw the fight renewed in full, the blinding flash only sparing a few scant moments between deaths. One of the red-sashes had fallen and Iyana dimly recognized him as the young man Talmir had spoken with on the road from the east. His eye had been replaced by the hilt of
a blade that looked similar to the one she had so recently held. Heat filled her breast and her eyes flashed with light that played off the rising and falling bits of metal and arrowheads.

  She reached out and snatched a pair of glowing red tethers, gathering them up in her own. She had an image of severing them like Sen might—like he was with one even now who collapsed in bloody convulsions. Instead she pulled and screamed a sound that could not have come from her throat, and the two warriors fell to their knees as if in prayer.

  Ket stood over them and raised his sword high and then took their throats, and Iyana felt sick as if she had swung the blade herself. She saw the other tethers—dozens of them, dancing and swaying above the forms that carried them on the backs of their hate and folly. She traced them down and held the ones she chose. Once still, they did not survive the press long, and with each fallen warrior Iyana felt her greenfire go cold. She knew she would not heal the wounded after this fight. She thought she might not again, as she had turned a gift meant for it into something quite different—into something like Sen, though she did not sever a single cord herself.

  She wondered which was worse, even as the two Faeykin snatched the unseen wills that ran between, above and among the leaping and darting fighters like hunting spiders among restless wasps.

  They were winning, Iyana knew, and yet they could not win. She knew it more fully than she had ever known a thing.

  There was a crack and a muffled sound like a mountain falling underwater, and Iyana turned toward the west. The purple fire had died some, but there was a brightness like a reborn sun. She squinted through it and shook her head at the strangeness of the image, then laughed in a manner not unlike Pevah had moments before.

  The Night Lord was, if not frozen again, then slowed to the point of looking the same. The space around him must have been held fast, as Iyana recognized the yellow orb with its growing spikes as the work of Creyath’s second shaft. It was like a starburst, and Iyana thought she might have a glimpse into the nature of the blue-black curtain above and all its winking lights. This one had struck true, and Pevah shook with the effort of containing it in the field of time he had made across the narrow distance. The beast roared and was caught in it, but Iyana knew with a single glance at the Sage that he could not remake the prison, just as she knew Creyath’s bolt had done little more than make a mockery of the creature’s former rage.

  Jes dove upon a tribesman that had been intent on her and Iyana spun back around. The scout drove her blade into the painted warrior’s chest, twisted and wrenched. Iyana could have made it easier for her. She could have snatched the man’s tether and wrapped it around her forearm as easily as Nathen Swell did one of his fishing lines. She could have. Instead, she swallowed past the acid guilt and watched them tumble and roll until another finished him off.

  Jes pushed the dead man off her and scrambled to her feet, casting a wild look at Iyana as she moved to re-enter the fray. Ket’s face was as red as Iyana’s, and she knew not all of it was borrowed. Mial heaved and pulled, his breath coming out in steaming gouts. He clutched at a wet spot in his side and backed away as one of the gray-sashes stepped in to intercept a blow that would have been fatal had it connected.

  Iyana looked beyond the scrum and thought she saw figures on the distant ridge—a pair that should have made her heart swell to see but that only served to deepen her dread.

  A blast of conjured wind from the west forced her a step eastward, and when next she looked toward the Night Lord, she saw him moving with a frightening speed.

  “Pevah!” one of the red-sashes cried out, pointing toward the black beast as it sent Ceth skidding half a league, a fin of white sand going up in his tumbling wake. Despite her numbness, Iyana felt a pang at the sight and even took a step in that direction before indecision and inability froze her like the Sage’s borrowed time could not.

  Pevah was on one knee and Creyath stood before him, his amber eyes watching the duel that was a massacre-in-waiting with a considered expression. Night Lord and Landkist slid across the horizon like twin suns. The old man put a hand on his knee and braced to rise. He extended his hands, intent on giving it another go.

  The Night Lord shot into the sky high enough to block out the silver light of the moon. He came down on the place Ceth had fallen, and Pevah’s time hit the spot immediately after so that the crater’s formation was like a slow wave of white sand spreading in a giant ripple. Iyana knew Ceth was dead until she saw him tumbling, seemingly weightless on winds the nightmare’s passing made. He looked unconscious and unaware until she saw him right himself and re-make his weight, landing with speed and solidity.

  He should have turned back toward them. He should have bolted from the spot, taken as many as he could and gone back to the depths below the eastern sands. He should have taken the blonde woman who had made a child with him and sheltered under the soft cold light of the crystal pillars that held the desert up, and hoped the Night Lord did not destroy that world once it finished with the one above.

  Instead, he ran back in, his powerful strides preparing another leap that took him up and over the dark king who, crouched and tensed as he was, rose higher than the leaning towers of Hearth. Those burning purple pits followed him, the armored crown swiveling on a neck made of something more elastic than obsidian but doubly strong.

  “He’s going to die,” Iyana said, and Pevah shot her a wild look that looked more animal than man. The Sage turned back to the flats and sent another wave, but the beast roared a roar that carried words Iyana couldn’t know, and now the slowness was half as strong as before.

  Ceth was knocked back by the wave of a passing limb. He flew over a crescent of purple fire, and each leap and daring somersault took him closer to that gaping maw and its crackling blue coals. Each pass tired him more, made him more predictable, the Night Lord more angry. He tugged the demon along on invisible threads of rage and fury, and in the places where the conjured flames died away, the desert sand had been melded into a burnt glass that had it skittering, sliding and striking the surface to crack the desert like an eggshell.

  The sounds of fighting had been drowned out by the raging of the titan, but now Iyana knew they had died away completely. She spun back toward the melee and saw the two groups separated once more, the painted warriors having pulled back, keeping the red- and gray-sashes and the Valley armor and swords back as much with those red-toothed smiles as with bared weapons. There were dead between them, and to Iyana’s relief, none among the caravan had yet fallen.

  The red-toothed warriors shot nervous and awed looks toward the duel between Night Lord and Landkist. Some seemed angry while others only smiled, knowing the beast could not be beaten by a man, no matter how strong, fast or daring. No matter how weightless or weighty.

  “You have more power than that,” Sen said, addressing the old man. His red eyes shifted toward the Faeykin, who was now holding himself apart, wary of the painted warriors who watched him, marking him a particular target among the many.

  Pevah did not deny Sen’s claims, which gave Iyana a strange impression. If the Sage had more power hidden away, what was he waiting for? What could give him pause or bring up hesitance in the face of such an overwhelming foe?

  “Using it all will kill him,” she reasoned. She spoke in an even tone, and the old man’s swallow told her it was true. Still, it did not seem to be what held him back, and his next words confirmed it.

  “I hold no fear of death,” he said, his eyes tracking the duel that was coming closer. Shards of melted desert flew in all directions, panes of mirrored glass large enough to slice a man in two. Gouts of that nightmare flame spiraled out like the petals of a wildflower, recalling the one Sen had slain weeks before, and now the stuff seemed to be coming from more than just the mouth. Iyana peered closer and saw the black skin glowing with a lavender light from within. The purple traced great tubes that must have been veins, the contrast it painted around the beating thing in its breast betraying the one w
eakness—a Dark Heart like the ones the White Crest had taken for safekeeping and which Linn and Nathen Swell had purged from the south.

  But Iyana knew this one was greater than those three. Greater by a margin beyond measure. She wondered dimly, morosely if those the White Crest had slain had been little more than courtiers next to this beast—a king among kings.

  The new thought brought up another that was nearly jarred loose when the lines at her back came together with renewed ferocity, metal ringing off bone and sending chips of white and red to join that littering the ground about them.

  Iyana fell into her greensight as Creyath began to walk forward. She knew by his gait and by his bearing that he would not stop. Pevah looked as though he wanted to stop him. Looked as if he knew he could not. The Ember held his hiltless blade in his right hand—the simplest length of Everwood Iyana had ever seen, like a spear without a haft. It burst into an amber light that matched its wielder’s stare, and he craned his head around and locked on hers as he moved west like a premonition. He smiled that white smile and then turned back while Iyana’s heart beat faster, her head pounding.

  She pierced the purple fire and the flailing black limbs and tried to ignore the speck of silver-white that arced between them. She locked on the black outline at the center—the Dark Heart surrounded by its purple poisoned coils of unlight. She searched and searched but came away desperate. She felt eyes on her and saw Pevah’s red stare. He shook his head once and her shoulders drooped.

  “No tether to tie that one to the World,” he said, guessing the direction of her thoughts. His smile was wan, a weaker version of Creyath’s, tragic where the Ember’s was bold—triumphant. “His like is the opposite of life, and those ropes you see are the chutes that feed it.”