Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1)

by Steven Kelliher

  As far back as he could remember, this was the first time Talmir actually thought they could lose. He only hoped his people would live to tell this tale.

  The streets further in were choked with traffic. When the cobbles leveled out, Talmir turned to look back toward the white shell protecting his city and the small fires protecting it. He was struck by how small and fragile it looked from here, just as he was struck by the vastness of the roiling mass beyond its arc, like a black sea.

  He shook his head, turned and picked up his pace, the city transforming from the gray and burnt orange of stone and tile to a kaleidoscope of vibrant colors as he entered the Red Bowl. This was the city’s central market and the driving force of all trade in the Valley, from the Lake to the Fork and the forests beyond. Great sheets of blue and white silk dripped their colors, clashing with the bright reds and oranges of the canvases that sheltered the merchants and their wares.

  Today, the market was as busy as ever during the Bright Days, but for all the wrong reasons. In place of the usual vendors and carts, Talmir noticed makeshift sick tents. In the place of lavish carpets were great sheets of cloth and bedrolls, laid out and waiting for occupancy.

  Talmir pushed his way through the buzzing throng and drove to the center, where the tables and crates had been arranged to make alcoves and halls through which healers walked with their wounded. Candles flickered on benches and in sconces in the beams overhead, casting the scene in a ruddy glow. The canvas flapped at its zenith, the sound like death’s wings, and Talmir felt suddenly very cold in the warm surroundings.

  He felt this way until he entered the alcove that had been reserved for his closest friend, and though Creyath Mit’Ahn slept, the heat hit him like a wall. The Ember’s bare chest festered with black and purple blotches where the Night Lord’s barbs had struck home, but his breathing was steady. The flames in the nearby candles grew and shrank in time with his breast.

  A young-looking man stooped over the Ember, his palms roving. He looked up when Talmir’s shadow fell over him and the Captain noted the bright green that marked one of the Faeykin, striking in the gloom. His lot were rare among the Emberfolk, though common among the Faey as the Rockbled were among the Rivermen. In recent years, their births had far out-stripped that of the Embers, something not lost on their peers, for better or worse.

  “His condition?” Talmir asked.

  “Stable. He asked to be woken when you came.”

  The green eyes flickered as he looked Talmir over, making it all-too-clear what he thought of Creyath’s request.

  “We are thankful for your gifts,” Talmir said, sounding stiff and feeling wooden.

  “Yes,” the Faeykin said. “Though the Embers do not respond as well to our touch. The fire burns out most wounds, but we assist where we can.”

  “Unfortunately,” Talmir said, looking at Creyath, “I think your gifts will be needed on many more before this is done. How many of you are there in the city?”

  “Faeykin? Perhaps a dozen. But only a select few have actually trained in the Eastern Valley under the Faey themselves.”

  “I see,” Talmir said. “I trust you are one of them?”

  His look was answer enough. He bent back to his work, but paused.

  “Captain,” he said, hesitant.

  “Yes?”

  “Can we hold?”

  “Precisely the question I’d like to ask,” a reedy voice carried on the back of a cool blast as the tent flap was thrown open.

  Talmir sighed and turned. A diminutive man wrapped in gaudy blue with gold trim strode forward with a confidence that stood at odds with his stature. This could be owed to his company, a pair of tall, burly guards Talmir would much rather have seen atop the wall. Behind the trio was a modest gathering of entirely immodest men and women bedecked in everything but steel.

  “Well?” the small man demanded, jewels jingling like the bell on a goat.

  Creyath groaned and shifted in his sleep, and Talmir patted the physician on the shoulder and left them, forcing the small retinue to follow him to the edge of the tent. As he walked, the Captain counted in his mind, eyes closed. It would not do to throttle the Merchant Captain of Hearth in the midst of a siege. Perhaps later.

  That was reason enough to win.

  He forced a tight smile as he turned. The act was akin to chiseling solid marble with a stick.

  “Merchant Captain Yush,” Talmir said, looking down at the man before sweeping his gaze to encompass the flanking guards and nobles, “and esteemed members of the Merchant Council.” He affected the poorest imitation of a bow he could muster. It did the trick. “To what do I owe …” It was too much. “This?”

  He finished without a shred of the force humility he had intended to project. Yush Tri’Az had the beady eyes of a rodent, but he was a sharp one with a long memory. Talmir knew he factored a little too heavily into said memory, and he had likely just carved himself out another spot. To Yush’s credit, he swallowed the slight best he could.

  “How long, Captain Caru, do you expect this storm to last?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “As long as it takes, I would expect.”

  Yush looked him up and down as the merchants flanking him fell into hushed deliberation.

  “Where have they come from?” Yush asked, accusation dripping. “The Dark Kind have never attacked during the Bright Days.”

  “The army here now is of the same world,” Talmir started.

  “The World Apart,” Yush waved his hands, ridiculous sleeves bouncing. If Talmir were a hound, he’d have torn them apart, tassels and all. “Where else would they come from? I’ve heard the whispers in the streets, Captain. They say these are men at our gates, not beasts.”

  “A bit of both,” Talmir admitted, flashing a smile that had Yush unsettled. “You’re welcome to take a look for yourself, Merchant Captain,” he said, emphasizing the modifier to his own title.

  The silence that followed was stunning to the gathered merchant nobles, humiliating to Yush Tri’Az, amusing to the various physicians bustling about the tent and entirely welcome to Talmir.

  When next Yush spoke, he nearly spit the words.

  “Have they no leaders?”

  “They have,” Talmir said, the red eyes flashing in his mind.

  “Then why have we not sent riders out to challenge them?”

  Talmir shook his head and blew out a sigh.

  “I am charged with defending this city.”

  “And I am charged with ensuring that in continues to run,” Yush said, cheeks red.

  “Your trade roads are not my concern.”

  “They will be,” Yush said in a harsh whisper. “When the fish stop coming up from the Lake, the venison from the woods and the steel from the Fork. Those roads will be your concern then, and the concern of every living person in the city as the Dark Months fall.”

  Talmir was silent, fuming. He met Yush’s stare as the others looked away.

  “What of the Lake?” Yush asked.

  “They would be foolish to try for Hearth.”

  “What of their mission? A number of their Embers were spied heading north through the western woods not a few days past.”

  Talmir bristled.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From the daughter of the old man you watched be cut down,” Yush sneered. “She met them on the road. Larren Holspahr was among them.”

  “Holspahr,” Talmir breathed.

  “Some fool’s errand from the witch Ninyeva,” Yush said, whipping around as Talmir’s thoughts spun of their own accord. He came back to himself.

  “I’ll let you and yours worry on the particulars of blame,” Talmir said, shouldering past the group. “I have a city to defend.”

  And a certain Runner to confront.

  The power to see.

  That was what Ninyeva had. That was the true power of the Faey and the Landkist of the Valley dubbed their kin.

  Faeykin had come to be synonymo
us with healing, but the trick was in seeing the hurt, feeling it. But the sight could go far beyond hurt and the ways around it. Her teachers could pierce cloud and canopy with theirs. Some could make a tool of time itself. Ninyeva was not so adept at navigating the Between, but she had made a go of it, and what she saw there she feared to believe.

  After her most recent trip, the sky had turned black, turning dream to premonition.

  The Emberfolk held her up as the best of their own, though the sands had not blessed her. The same Rivermen that cast stones at her in those early years later begged her to heal their children when the sick came. Their songs had followed her back to her village as she left on her uncle’s bouncing wagon.

  Of course, the fighting had continued, had even increased for a time, but it was Ninyeva who first sewed the seeds of peace in the Valley’s core. Relations between the Emberfolk and the Riverman had improved drastically over the next two generations, and even the Faey had grown less scarce, their wilder tribes less prone to violence.

  This was just one of the reasons they referred to her, simply, as ‘Mother.’

  And what sort of mother was she? She, who had sent her children, her bright stars, out into the night on a fool’s quest. She had planted those seeds as well, and how quick they had grown, first in Kole and then in the hearts of others who now found themselves in the wilds as the black river of Dark Kind flowed unabated into their world.

  Ninyeva felt the sting of the cold as a particularly violent gust threatened to tear the shawl from her shoulders. She gripped it tighter and leaned against a post under the eaves, waiting for the worst to pass. She felt the cold as despair. But more than that, she felt a simmering of rage, and it was the same rage that gripped the whole of her people each in their own hearts. It was the rage of a people with a fallen king and an absentee guardian.

  Where was the White Crest? Where was their savior when they needed him most?

  Not since burying the Night Lords of the Eastern Dark in the fissures of the Deep Lands had he made his presence known. And now here they squatted, huddled in the cold and dark, waiting for the Dark Kind to finish the job the Eastern Dark had begun a century ago on the red roads to the north. The peoples of the Valley would die in the shadows, their Embers spirited away to serve one they despised.

  The Eastern Dark was their enemy, but she knew the power she had felt in the peaks, and it did not match the dark storm that had come against them. The White Crest had been killed by that same enemy. Or had he endured? If only her people knew how she railed against the very visions she used to guide them.

  “Mother Ninyeva?”

  She opened her eyes to find a gruff man with white stubble staring at her through the eaves.

  “Don’t worry on me,” she said, straightening and smoothing the folds from her robes. “Headed down to the Long Hall.”

  “I’ll take you,” he said in a tone that broached no argument. He took her by the crook of the arm.

  A decade earlier, she’d have refused him. Now, she only sighed and let him guide her down the way, through the slipping stones and tiny running rivers the storm had left behind.

  He left her by the door with a warm, good-natured bow, though his look said to her, ‘You are old and weak.’

  Ninyeva showed him her smile, canines and all, and climbed the short stair. At the top, she twisted the copper handle and entered without knocking.

  It was warm inside but not pleasant. Doh’Rah and his son were here. The First Keeper slouched against the far wall with arms crossed, unwilling to grant his father respite from the withering attention of the crows in the chamber.

  “Faey Mother,” the tallest of them said, her stare baleful. “Did the storm harry you?”

  Ninyeva only smiled at Doh’Rah, whose gaze softened under her own. His color was high and his face weary, the scavengers having been at him a while.

  No matter. Ninyeva was far older than they, half as frail and doubly cunning. Their shadows were loping things and hers was a tiger. The Seers of Eastlake were all too aware of this, and they parted to make room for her beside the fire.

  Ninyeva sat and the crows—Kita, Virena, Maeg and Rusul—met her green eyes with their own quarrelsome beads.

  “Now then,” Ninyeva started. “What have you to say?”

  The others shrank and fumbled, but not Rusul.

  “The storm outside has quieted, Faey Mother,” she said. “But not in the north. Corrupted walk the green fields of Hearth; we have seen this and so have you. They are thick about the walls, and soon they will break through.”

  Ninyeva made no move to correct her and Tu’Ren shifted uncomfortably, averting his gaze.

  “In this time,” Rusul continued, “we are left without some of our stoutest defenders, Larren Holspahr chief among them. And now Kole Reyna has followed them fresh out of nightmare. He has taken the Kane twins with him.”

  “And you hold me responsible?” Ninyeva asked, unable or unwilling to keep the challenge from her tone.

  “Ninyeva has nothing to do with the whims and fancies of would-be heroes,” Doh’Rah cut in.

  “I want to know where they’ve gone,” Rusul said, ignoring the old man. The red in his face deepened.

  “North,” Ninyeva said, drawing a mirthless laugh from Maeg, whom Rusul silenced with a glare. The eldest of the crows tried to project Ninyeva’s sense of calm, but it was a thin veneer.

  “And what do they hope to find there?”

  “The truth, as it were,” Ninyeva shrugged. “Whatever form that takes to the young and restless.”

  “Your truth, you mean,” Rusul said more than asked. “You planted the seeds in Reyna and his ilk after the Night Lord came.”

  “Think what you will,” Ninyeva said, looking at them each in turn, “but I do not profess to know it completely, no matter what I have seen. I do not cast bones and entrails to see ends. Our youngest and brightest have taken charge of their destinies, and ours as well. Whatever they find in the north, they will be the engineers of its reckoning.”

  Doh’Rah cleared his throat.

  “Our children and their children have bled and died in darkness for a generation,” he said. “Our leisure time is spent in preparation, and we have no time for mourning; it is a chore, another cold thing to be buried next to the dead. The World Apart sends its denizens and we blame a faceless terror from the desert days. The Eastern Dark fell, and now perhaps he has risen, but we should lay the blame at our own feet. Too long did we let the waves break upon us.”

  “Too long did another watch the tide rise,” Ninyeva said.

  “You would blame the White Crest?” Rusul asked. “Who fell to protect us from one of his own?”

  Ninyeva swallowed, her confidence wavering. And then she saw the light snuffed out in the passes as a Sage watched on. She saw Kole Reyna sobbing in the rain for a mother lost and a father just as well for the impact it had.

  “If it is the Eastern Dark returned,” she said, “why has he sent a force to purge the Valley, where before he wanted to control, to wield? The guilty burn alongside the innocent when the fire is wild. Each flame carries its own truth, and there are a few heading north to see what catches.”

  Something in Ninyeva’s tone—the honesty, even the uncertainty—gave Rusul pause as her sisters shifted and mouthed their complaints.

  “Our gifts are for more than casting old bones and seeing where they fall,” Rusul said. “And we have not come to the same conclusions.”

  “You have not come to any conclusions,” Ninyeva said. “Watching has virtues all its own. We now find ourselves in the roll of observer.”

  “So it would seem,” Rusul said, eyes roving. “Only take care your strings don’t catch fire, lest your fingers burn with the rest.”

  The farther north they trekked, the more agitated Shifa became. Once or twice they had glimpsed shadows moving beneath distant branches. They were spared from sight only because of the hound’s low warnings. These were not the typica
l forms of the Dark Kind, but rather the shadows of men all twisted.

  The Corrupted were easy enough to dodge, but it was the Sentinels Kole feared. He felt it in his bones that it had been luck more than fire that had saved him among the roots, and he kept alert for the telltale glint of ruby red amidst the black.

  Kole had explained the Sentinels to the best of his ability—their strength and speed, as well as their cunning. While Taei nodded curtly, Fihn had adopted an attitude that bordered on curiosity, as if she wanted to test herself against the Captains of the World Apart. Part of Kole wanted to disavow her of that notion by letting her try, but the greater part hoped she would be able to keep her smug disposition until their journey was through.

  “They’re bees,” Fihn said, polishing her slender sword for the second time that day. “The Corrupted are their drones, the Sentinels their messengers and the Night Lords their Queens.”

  “What does that make the Eastern Dark?” Taei asked.

  “A Sage,” Fihn tossed back. “One who meddles with powers not his own.”

  “Who says it’s the Eastern Dark?” Kole asked over his shoulder. He had his head on a swivel as they checked gear and waited for Shifa’s return. He turned when neither of the twins answered and found them staring at him as if he were daft.

  “Forget it,” he said, bending to strap on his pack, ensuring the handles of his blades were not obscured. He went back to his scanning. The forest was thinner here in the central Valley, with more spaces between the trees. Though it was day, the light was gray through the smoky cloud-cover, which had not lifted since they had set out. He shuddered as the black images from his dream flooded back.

  “What’s got you all out of sorts?” Fihn asked pointedly.

  It was a profoundly stupid question to Kole and his look said as much. Fihn rolled her eyes.

  “You killed it, didn’t you?” she asked. “Now you know what it takes, and you know you’ve got it.”