Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1)

by Steven Kelliher

  Despite the circumstances, the girl was beautiful, her face lit orange and blue. Iyana wondered whom her parents had been, if she had loved or been loved. She tried not to look at the prone form of her brother leaning sickly above her head.

  “I felt like a passenger to the flames,” Tu’Ren said, and as he did, the girl finally broke, her body wracked with sobs. She looked down at the ground.

  Iyana heard rustling and turned to see Fort’U helping a woozy Vennil to her feat, the tracker keeping a weary eye on Tu’Ren all the while. The First Keeper of Hearth reached her maimed hand out toward the still form of Croen Teeh as Fort’U whispered words of comfort, dragging her onto the paths beyond.

  “I wanted to ask her why she had done it.”

  Iyana turned back to the deadly scene. Tu’Ren’s fist was all blue now, his eyes the yellow of sunlight.

  “I wanted to ask if the children of the Faey had whimpered as she did now before she burned them up. Most of all, I wanted to ask how either of us could ever be forgiven.”

  The blade became a beam that became an inferno, engulfing the girl, her brother and the tree that marked them in a flash of light so bright in rendered Iyana blind. She screamed for what felt like minutes, the image of the kneeling girl imprinted on the backs of her lids. She was shaking. Or being shaken.

  “Yani? Iyana?”

  She opened her eyes to see a face lined with care, worry … and regret. It was a face so at odds with the one she had just seen it almost seemed alien.

  “I’m … okay,” she said weakly, allowing the Ember to help her into a seated position.

  Tu’Ren put a cold cup into her hands and she drank deeply, the shock revitalizing her. Neither of them spoke for a time as the fire turned to coals in the hearth.

  “You were there, weren’t you?”

  Iyana nodded and Tu’Ren looked as though his heart might break then and there. She laid a hand on his arm, surprised at its coolness.

  “Thank you,” she said, green eyes shining. “I know how hard that was. Truly I know.”

  Tu’Ren nodded and sighed. He stood and crossed to the window, looking out at the gate beyond.

  “I need to get back up there,” he said without turning. “Need to keep up appearances. Make it look like we’re doing something, after all. Something aside from waiting.”

  The Ember retrieved his cloak from the rack. He wore no scabbard and instead strapped his great Everwood blade—a different one than that he had burned up in the memory—to his back.

  “The reason I build my fires the old fashioned way, little Yani,” he said, standing over her, “is because it reminds me that, though I hold the flame within me, we are separate things. It is a gift from the World. That does not make it a good thing or a bad thing. Just a thing.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder.

  “The Embers may be more overtly powerful than many of the other Landkist,” he said, “but the World does not bestow any of its gifts lightly. I have to believe that. Explore yours, Iyana, but never let them explore you. Do not become lost from who you are.”

  “You never have,” Iyana said. “I know who you are.”

  Judging by the look on the First Keeper’s face, it was exactly what he needed to hear.

  After he had left, she wrapped the rug tighter around her, watching the sputtering flames in the hearth.

  “I know who I am.”

  As it turned out, the air got no fresher the higher they climbed, the appearance of another arm of the subterranean river proof of how violently and how deeply the River F’Rust had delved in its decades of captivity.

  The three of them knew the river completely now: the smell of its waters—metal and gravel mixed—and the cool kiss of its spray. They knew its taste—tin and copper—just as they knew its sound as the roar of the earth itself.

  The feeling of elation Linn had experienced upon finding a tunnel that moved up instead of down days earlier had entirely dissipated, leaving her struck with the helpless reality that they were hopelessly lost. Their food stores were nearly depleted and their bodies bore the scrapes and bruises of creatures unused to the darkness of the Deep Lands.

  Linn hated the river. She hated it as she had never hated another person. She hated it as she had never hated the Dark Kind. She hated its indifference, most of all. Even as it provided her its lifeblood, she accepted it grudgingly. It felt like drinking poison.

  “I think we should rest here,” Jenk said when they came to a particularly wide berth of the same featureless black rock they had come to loath.

  Nathen dropped the small pack that represented their combined possessions and sank in a slouch against the tar-colored wall without a word. His eyes were vacant and his stomach spoke louder than he did.

  “Works for me,” Linn said. She leaned against the same wall and watched Nathen out of the corner of her eye. His breathing was slow, deliberate. She worried about him.

  Sighing, Jenk stripped off his boots and went to the edge of the platform, sinking his feet into the flowing black water with a sigh. He did this each day they stopped to rest, and each day, the hiss the water made upon contact with his skin grew fainter. He needed light. Needed it badly.

  Watching him, Linn had to admit that Ganmeer had surprised her. She had never much liked him at the Lake. But then, she had never truly known him as a separate thing from Kaya. Perhaps he had played at being a hero in the vein of his grandfather long enough in youth that it had come true. His face bore the haggard look of exhaustion, but, unlike Nathen and, perhaps herself, there was no defeat to be found in the Ember.

  It was ironic, in its own way. Linn knew that men and women showed their true colors when pushed to the limit, and those colors were rarely bright. Though his heat had cooled, Jenk seemed to be the exception.

  A sound that was keener than the low rumble of the river and more muted than the echoes of splashes among the black rocks snaked its way through the chamber. It was a pitiful sound, Linn thought, squeezing her eyes shut. She did not realize it was coming from her until Jenk put his arm around her shoulders and it stopped.

  Linn struggled past the lump in her throat. When she finally did, she opened her eyes and saw that Jenk’s own glistened with dew in the darkness, two more sparkling surfaces in the slick caverns.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and the echoes magnified the words. Jenk regarded her with a mix of sympathy and confusion, while Nathen merely adopted the latter.

  “I can’t imagine what for,” Jenk said. It could have been a joke for the sharp irony, but he said it with conviction. He meant it.

  “All of it,” she said. “For bringing us out here. For Larren. For Baas. For,” her voice broke. “For Kaya.”

  “What else were we to do?” Jenk asked, letting his head fall back against the wall with a thud. “We were waiting for our deaths at Last Lake. Might as well take control and choose a place for it.”

  “You’d choose here?”

  “I don’t plan to die here.”

  There was a pause as they all digested the words, worked them over and held them close. Nathen looked a little more awake now, a little less sullen.

  “What do we do if we find him?” Linn asked, more to herself than the others.

  “The White Crest or the Eastern Dark?”

  “Either. They’re both Sages.”

  Jenk turned a curious look on her.

  “I would hardly compare the one with the other,” he said.

  “Kole would.”

  “Our people are dying.”

  “And we are here, in the Deep Lands.”

  “That is why we are here,” Jenk said. “We’ve all become good at killing and better at dying since the Dark Kind started coming in earnest. It’s time we tried something else.”

  The Ember sighed as he finished, and Linn was suddenly conscious of how cool it was in the close chamber despite his presence. He looked pale in the gloom. If not for the light trickling in from faraway chutes and chimneys, they wo
uld have had to spend him more by relying on his blade to navigate.

  “How are you?” she asked softly, putting a hand on his bare arm. He pulled away and tried to affect a smile.

  “I’ll live,” he said. “Someone has to answer for all this.”

  “That someone being a Sage, most likely,” Linn said. “Unless it’s some general from the World Apart holed up in these mountains.”

  “No,” Jenk said. “That’s not how they operate. The Night Lords are their generals, the Sentinels their Captains of corruption. Only the Eastern Dark communes with them, organizes them like this.”

  “What if Kole is right?” Linn asked. “What if the White Crest lives?”

  “Then I’ll have my answers from him,” Jenk said, the threat of violence lingering. “If he hasn’t intervened on our behalf, as was his agreement with the King of Ember, he’s in no position to stand up to us.”

  “To you,” Linn corrected. “Nathen and I are capable, but we are no Landkist. He’ll answer to you.”

  Jenk shrugged as if it did not matter, but Linn could feel the atmosphere swell and collapse as he flared.

  “Jenk?”

  His breathing grew heavy and his eyes fluttered.

  “Fine,” he said, but the word drifted as he slumped.

  “Nathen!”

  The other man was up in a flash that belied his exhausted state. He pulled Jenk away from the wall and laid him down, the Ember’s breaths coming short and fast. Linn rested a hand on his forehead, which was pulsing, alternating between hot and cool before settling to something close to normal. That was not good. Linn had never heard of an Ember dying from lack of sun and flame, but prolonged deprivation could make them seriously ill.

  “I’m … fine,” he whispered again and Linn shushed him.

  A blanket of calm settled on her. There was something to do and she’d see it done.

  “You’re fading, Ganmeer,” she said. “We need a fire.”

  “What about his blade?” Nathen asked. “Why can’t he light that and use the flames to charge?”

  “Everwood blades are conduits. I don’t understand it completely, but I know they don’t burn so much as come to life. He needs a fire with real fuel.”

  “Nothing,” Jenk started, but Linn spoke over him.

  “There is,” she said, turning to Nathen. “You remember the last pool we passed? The slow one with foam at the edges.”

  Nathen nodded, eyes widening.

  “There was debris. Bark or lichen.”

  “I remember,” he said, rising to his feet as Jenk tried to grab at him weakly. “It won’t take long.” He walked to the back of the chamber, where the path curved around the river. Linn followed.

  When they were comfortably out of earshot, she turned him around.

  “You know the way?”

  He nodded, looking to their right, where the pathway spiraled down into the deeper darkness. Jenk had been forced to ignite his blade shortly after passing that pool, but Nathen was an experienced hunter; mapping the paths was second nature to him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Back before you know I’m gone.”

  Linn watched his silhouette melt into the shadows. She sighed and went back to Jenk.

  “You’ll be thanking me when we reach the Steps,” Linn said, trying to ignore the pointed look Jenk managed despite his delirium. “You’d have done the same.” And that quelled him.

  Jenk struggled against it for a time, but he eventually succumbed to sleep, leaving Linn to her thoughts in the dark. She thought of the twisting pathways through the woods to the south and how much she missed them. She’d even take them chalk-full of Dark Kind over the maddening maze of tedium they found themselves in now.

  She thought of the cave. No matter how hard she tried, however, she could not help her thoughts from turning toward home. Toward the waters of Last Lake, which would never ignore her in the dark and deep as the River F’Rust did. She thought of Iyana. Finally, she thought of Kole. Surely he had awoken by now to find her gone. She only hoped he had not been as foolish as she.

  There was a dry snap that jolted Linn into a crouch, the long knife Nathen had left her held out horizontally in her hand. She did not flinch. She never did, eyes piercing the middle distance like few could match. Jenk stirred beside her but did not wake.

  She exhaled, all relief as Nathen’s broad shoulders broke the black canvas. He kicked a dried tangle forward. At first, it looked like a bundle of branches clutched in his arms, but as he neared, Linn noted that the material was an odd mix of purple and blue. It was some sort of fungus.

  “Think it’s safe to burn?” he asked, dropping the bundle. “Dried fast.” His bare chest was still slick from a mixture of water and sweat.

  “We’ll find out. How did you get down there so fast?”

  “Took a shortcut,” he said, and something in his tone made Linn look up from snapping the dried pieces into kindling.

  “You didn’t,” she said, shocked. He smirked. “You rode the river down?”

  “I’m a strong swimmer,” he said and she shook her head.

  Nathen looked at Jenk.

  “He looks like a corpse.”

  Linn gave him a sharp glare and he held his hands up.

  “Think he can get a spark going?”

  “He’ll have to.”

  Together, they lifted the Ember into a seated position. His eyelids fluttered but he gave no sign of waking. It struck home then just how depleted Jenk must have been. Linn wondered how she had not noticed it sooner. Her respect for him had already multiplied since setting out from Last Lake, but now it soared to new heights.

  “Jenk. Jenk …”

  Finally, the Ember woke with a start, eyes darting around as he attempted to orient himself. Linn took hold of his temples and looked him dead on. He settled.

  “Ve’Ran,” he breathed.

  “A spark, Jenk. We need a spark.”

  She indicated the pile of scrap before them. It would burn quickly, but Nathen had gathered more than she would have thought possible. It had to be enough.

  Jenk did not look entirely convinced, but he squeezed his eyes shut tight and leaned forward under his own power. For a spell, he was still as death, and then the veins stood out on his neck, their swelling forming ridgelines that snaked their slow way down his arms and tunneled like worms on the backs of his hands. His light hair moved as if stirred by a breeze only he could feel.

  His eyes flashed opened, and Linn thought she caught a hint of bright amber before the blues returned. A spark took, igniting the cache in a flare that rendered Linn and Nathen blind and yelping like pups. After what felt like a searing eternity, Linn opened her eyes to a scene so at odds with the sudden violence of the burst that she nearly laughed.

  Jenk sat cross-legged before the crackling flames, his eyes closed and his face a picture of serenity that bordered on communion. Judging by his own expression, Nathen must have been thinking the same thing.

  “Thank you,” the Ember said, and though his voice was distant, it already sounded stronger, steadier.

  “My pleasure,” Nathen said nonchalantly, scooting closer to the flames now that his eyes had adjusted.

  Linn moved to join them, watching curiously as Jenk drank in the heat from the darkening coals that broke off from the pile.

  “Will it be enough?” she asked, concerned at the rate at which the scrub was disintegrating. The fire was already losing its life.

  “Plenty,” Jenk said, and the blaze flared up again before settling back down.

  “You’re controlling it.”

  “I can slow the flames,” Jenk said. “Get as much heat out of it as possible.”

  They sat around the fire like children waiting for a tale. Linn had not been aware of the chill in her bones, but it evaporated and left her feeling warm for the first time in weeks. Her stomach growled as the scent of burning reminded her of food, and they split the last shreds of salted meat between them, softening i
t in the flowing river before setting to chew.

  “Why did you both come?” Jenk asked, and Linn felt as taken aback as Nathen looked.

  The Ember opened his eyes to regard them.

  “I mean no offense,” he said. “But since we’ve some time to kill, I thought I’d know. I asked Baas the same thing before we set out. His reasons were quite simple: the Rivermen have no love for the Sages—any of them. He knew that playing any role in the death or surrender of one of them would plant him firmly in the lore of his people.”

  Neither Linn nor Nathen spoke. Jenk sighed and continued.

  “Kaya’s intentions were never verbalized, but I knew her better than most.”

  Jenk’s expression changed, a shadow passing over his face. He swallowed.

  “She sought to prove herself. To me, to you.” Linn rocked back, uncomfortable. “To everyone, I’d expect.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Larren Holspahr set out under a sense of duty, I expect. I don’t know if he believed in the validity of our trek, but he certainly didn’t think we’d get far without him.”

  “There’s irony,” Linn said, staring into the flames.

  Nathen sighed and gripped his leggings so tight his knuckles went pale.

  “My mother is sick,” he said, unable to meet their surprised eyes. “The waste is in her. She doesn’t have much time left and neither Ninyeva nor Iyana could help her much.”

  “Iyana said she wouldn’t accept help,” Linn said, trying to keep the challenge out of her voice.

  “That too,” Nathen said. “I’ve never believed in the White Crest, but she does. I’m not sure what I expected. That I’d find him, fall to my knees and beg his help. Now, I don’t feel much like begging. I don’t feel much like asking, to be honest.”

  He looked up at them, face set and stern, a look that clashed with his youthful features.

  “If he does live, then he abandoned us,” he said. “Or something much worse.”

  Neither of them argued with him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with hoping,” Jenk said.

  “Plenty wrong with it,” Nathen said, but there was no fight in him. He stared back into the flames, which had sunk lower.