The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  Karin would return from his ranging soon enough, but he was not the one Talmir sought now. He rounded the second wagon and passed a pair of milling horses. One of the other Faeykin, a male with white-streaked black hair, ministered to the burns they’d suffered, his palms glowing in the dusk as he brought the animals a measure of calm while he closed their wounds and patched their tough hides.

  “Where is Sen?” Talmir asked, and the man looked up at him, harsh features framing a light complexion.

  “That way.” He indicated the north and Talmir nodded and left him to it. He left the mounts behind and passed through a wide gap that separated their dune from another. The golden rays of the dying sun hit him full on, but where the day had been hot to the point of threat, this light held the caress of an old friend saying a last goodbye.

  A lone figure stood before him, facing the same sunset over the rolling hills. The tops were splashed with molten gold and the bases crept with shadows that grew long and blue. The desert foxes were out. Talmir could see the hints of them cresting the hills, following tracks and trails only they knew.

  The Faeykin still looked strange to him. Not for his obvious differences, but for the sameness he and the others had adopted since joining the caravan. The traveling pants and loose-fitting cotton shirts in the place of dragging robes. The hair bound back in a tail rather than free-flowing.

  Talmir took a step toward him. Something tickled at his temple and caused him to look up the southern dune. At the top stood Iyana, white hair billowing as it had been the day before. Only now her eyes were not fixed on the western horizon, nor were they focused on him. They were seeking to pierce the one Talmir sought to speak with now.

  He waved up to her and she blinked, waving back. He held up a hand to stay her and then continued on, coming to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the man known as Sen. He was taller than the rest, his body more sturdy. If his skin did not show the same milky hue as the Faey of the Valley, Talmir would have thought him another soldier—a good one. But the eyes gave him away, even if they were a sight darker, a sight less brilliant than those belonging to the one who watched them now.

  Talmir opened his mouth to speak, but Sen beat him to it.

  “You’re going to ask what I was doing,” he said. His tone did not sound accusatory, nor did it hold the defensiveness Talmir might have expected.

  “I was.”

  “It’s simple, Captain.” He looked Talmir in the eyes, and try as he might, Talmir could not see a hint of deception held therein. “I was trying to help.”

  “By standing stock-still before a pack of monsters while the rest of the company retreated?” His tone lacked all subtlety. He did not like Sen, he decided. He had thought as much, but now he let the truth of it wash over him and accepted it as something that was. “Did you mean to make a noble sacrifice to delay them?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Sen said. He held Talmir’s gaze, unmoving and unblinking.

  “You meant to fight,” Talmir reasoned, lowering his chin in a manner he knew was condescending. It couldn’t be helped under the circumstances.

  “In a manner of speaking. Yes.”

  Talmir sighed and shook his head, kicking one of the tiny, foot-sized dunes over and smoothing it out to form a grooved crescent that caught the sunset.

  “Sen,” Talmir started, but again the Faeykin interrupted, and now his tone showed some of the condescension Talmir was about to inject into his own.

  “I know what you think of us,” he said, and Talmir nearly took a step back. He quirked an eyebrow. “The Faeykin.” Sen bared his teeth, his demeanor shifting so quickly Talmir nearly made a grab for his blade. And just like that, it blew out, replaced by the calm, serene presence he had affected up to now. Perhaps he had put those empathetic powers to use and had sensed Talmir’s martial intent.

  “What do I think of you?” Talmir asked, allowing himself to be led even as he bristled at the man’s tone and bearing. Apparently, he had chosen correctly in approaching him away from the camp. Then again, maybe it was Sen who had seen the conversation coming.

  “You think us simple healers.”

  “Nothing simple about any of the Landkist, near as I can tell,” Talmir said. He meant it. He touched the silver and black pommel of his father’s sword. “Plenty simple about this. I don’t put the same on you. Believe me.”

  Sen considered him for a long moment as if assessing the truth of his words, or the intent behind them.

  “There is much more to us than you know,” Sen said after a time. “Much more than she knows.” He gave the slightest of nods—little more than a twitch toward the great wall of sand at Talmir’s back—but he knew whom he meant.

  Talmir leaned in, feeling suddenly unnerved, and a fair bit riled. Sen did not step back.

  “Whatever your power, SenaFaey—” The emerald eyes widened just a bit to expose the whites. “Yes. I know you. I know your name, at least. I don’t let anyone into my company without knowing it. The Valley has many inhabitants, but not so many, Sen. Not too many for me to know. I don’t know your past, but I know you’ve got one. We all do.” Sen’s tongue worked behind his teeth, but he held it. “No better place for one of those than on the road, in my experience.”

  “Why did you let me come?” Sen asked, sounding genuine, if unconcerned. “You must know what the others think of me. You must know I’m not like them.”

  “The Faeykin of Hearth are as wary of you as most are of them,” Talmir said. “But superstition has no power over me. I’ve fought against the Dark Kind and their dark captains, as you have. I’ve seen demigods wield fire to protect the heart of our people. There are few things that can surprise me. All power has its uses. Even yours, whatever it may be.” Talmir paused. “And whatever it may be, it’s in addition to what we need you for. You’re still a healer, whatever else is floating behind those eyes. She’s still a healer.”

  Sen made as if to speak, but Talmir stopped him.

  “I earned one name on the walls of Hearth in recent days,” Talmir said. “Dark days. But believe me, Sen. I’ve earned plenty worse in brighter days than these. Before the Dark Kind came spilling in from the Corruption in the mountains, the Valley knew blood. The Valley knew conflict. A few in this company were in it.”

  Sen’s look changed, then.

  “I’m older than I look, Captain,” he said, and Talmir believed him. He’d thought there was a slant to the ears he hid beneath his golden hair. Now he knew.

  “You don’t look like the Faey,” Talmir said.

  “Are we done here?” Sen asked, lips forming a tight line.

  “That’s entirely up to you.”

  Sen regarded him with a steady smolder. He glanced up and smiled at the place where Iyana watched before meeting Talmir’s eyes.

  “We all have secrets, Captain Talmir,” he said. “All you need to know of mine is that you’ve got no place in them. None in this company do. Any who did are lost to us, now. Tragedies, one and all.”

  “You sound broken up about it.” Talmir spat into the sand.

  “I won’t get in your way again, Captain,” Sen said. “But just remember. The next time this company needs saving, an Ember’s fire might not be the only power about.”

  Talmir twisted on his heel and left the man in the sunset gateway between dunes. It felt like defeat, but he was too bothered to care.

  He felt Sen’s eyes drift away from him, likely alighting back on the ethereal battle being waged on the western horizon. He looked up as he half-walked, half-crawled up the sheer side of the shifting mound and saw Iyana staring at him.

  “Graceful,” she said with a smile as he reached the top. Talmir dusted himself off and turned to look back at the bottom. “He’s gone back to the wagons,” she said, answering his questing expression.

  Talmir nodded and looked out over the golden-red hills, avoiding her gaze and the questions that came with it.

  “Looks like rain,” Iyana said, noting the drifting cloud
s.

  “This being the desert, I’d say you were wrong,” Talmir said. He leaned back and squinted to the east. “This being the wider World—something I know nothing about—I’d say it looks like rain.”

  She laughed and he joined her. It felt as good as the breeze that dried his sweat and jarred the grains loose from his chin and chest.

  “Perhaps Linn sent it,” Talmir said, regretting it as the words left his lips. He glanced sidelong at Iyana, but in the place of hurt, he saw a look like pride. It warmed him even as the day grew cooler.

  “What was all that, Captain?” she asked and he spat again, though his mouth had gone too dry for it.

  “Just a talk,” he said, dismissive. He sighed and shifted. “What do you think of him?” The question surprised him even as it seemed to surprise her.

  She was a long time answering.

  “I’d like to know him better, I think,” she said. After a moment, she added: “There’s something about him. A different sort of power than mine, I think. The others didn’t even want me to help them with healing the horses. I’m not as experienced, I suppose. But then,” her voice rose with her mounting ire, “I was never trained among the Faey themselves.”

  Talmir smiled as her eyes glazed over. She prodded him in the side. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Each day, you surprise me more and more,” he said. He looked beyond her, trying to make out the gray smudges in the north. “Be careful with him,” he said. “With Sen, I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “He is wise, in a way,” Talmir continued. “I’ve no doubt there’s much he can teach you. But there is a chaos to him. Or, if not chaos—”

  “I know,” she said again, and he thought she meant it.

  He left it at that, unsure what more to say, and they watched the sun dip below the dunes, which were drenched in blue shadow even as those to the north were dyed deep red and purple. It was a striking color Talmir.

  “He is here, I think,” Talmir said after a time. His gaze spanned south to north, and always west.

  “The Red Waste,” Iyana said. “I think so, too.”

  “That makes two fools in the desert,” Talmir said. “And a score more following them.”

  Iyana smiled. “I don’t think you’re a fool, Talmir Caru. I think you’re a hero. And I think you’re an idealist.”

  Talmir nearly fell. He imagined himself completing a long and comical slide to the shifting base.

  “I have to say, that’s the first time I’ve been accused.” It wasn’t. Rain Ku’Ral had said as much. She’d always said it, no matter how often he tried to forget.

  Iyana was silent.

  “The truth is,” Talmir said with a sigh, “guilt is my great gift. My curse.” Iyana frowned, and her eyes sparked with a bit of that alien glow as the pang ran through him. It was as if she could feel it as he did. Of course, she could.

  “Guilt for leaving,” Iyana said, and he could only nod, though he felt like crying, like wetting this dry land before the clouds above them could.

  “I know,” he said before she could speak further. “I know why we’re here.”

  “Why?” she asked. He did not know if she was leading him. It didn’t matter.

  “To find answers,” he said. “To find power, or a means to end it. To find hope.”

  He could feel her smile even if he couldn’t see it. Instead, he watched the sun lose its battle just as he saw two figures detach themselves from the rolling piles beyond—Karin and Mial, back from their ranging.

  “We must be desperate indeed,” Iyana said, “looking for hope in a land like this.”

  “This is a land of desperation, I think,” Talmir said. “All lands are, in their own way. Besides. If we can survive this, the Dark Months will seem a respite.”

  As Karin half-walked, half-slid down the lower dunes before them with Mial struggling to affect the same pace, Talmir thought of the desert nomads. Were they really nomads? Or were the Valley-folk walking uninvited into a kingdom beneath the sands? If so, would they be welcomed as friend or foe?

  “If we find him,” Iyana started and then stopped. “When we find him, what makes you think we can trust him?”

  “Choice,” Talmir said. “More specifically, the lack of it.” He showed her a smile, but judging by her frown, it was lost in the deepening shadows. “The King of Ember trusted him, back when that meant something.”

  “It still might,” Iyana said.

  “Maybe. Kole Reyna will be the judge of that, for better or worse.”

  He took her silence for agreement.

  They waited for Karin and Mial to reach them, and listened to the strange howls the desert foxes made as they mixed and clashed with the campfire songs behind and below.

  It was a strange music, and not unpleasant. But the campfire songs would die away well before the break of day while the desert foxes would sing their chorus into the reaches of the night—a night darker than all but those of the recent Valley war, now that the clouds had stolen back the sky.

  Mother Ninyeva had said the desert was the land of lessons. Just a week into their trek, and already Iyana knew what she meant.

  The sun had beat them to the point of near submission. She remembered how it seared her skin and thought of how that glowing disc—so beautiful as it retreated behind the horizon each night—had forced them to take shelter beneath a nest of scaled and slithering horrors just yesterday. She had expected the coming storm to bring some measure of respite.

  She had been mistaken.

  Iyana sneezed into the soaked sleeve of her shirt, adding an unpleasant slime to the mix, and shivered as she pulled her hood tighter over her head. Her bangs were plastered in place, and she was nearing the point of wanting to rip them out at the roots. She had rolled her trousers up to avoid them catching and pulling on the larger jagged stones beneath the shifting sands, and now they were caked with a pasty mix of the stuff.

  A stab of panic struck her when she realized the footprints she had been following had vanished. She looked up, frantic, and saw nothing but brown mud, the dunes appearing like piles of dung with small rivers running between them. It was like a flat painting, a brown smear that continued up and merged with the ugly gray of the cloud-covered skies.

  “This way!”

  The voice had come from behind. Or was it above? Iyana twisted and whirled, nearly going over as her boots broke the wet crust of the surface and set her splashing into the dry sand below.

  “Iyana.”

  Now the voice was closer, the howling wind playing its tricks on her. She saw the old scout, Mial, standing on the side of the dune she stood below. He held out a hand to her, but she grimaced and retraced her steps, following the path he’d taken up a thin bridge of crust that separated two mounds.

  “Stay close, young one,” he said as he passed her by. “Easy to get turned around out here.” He said it less with condescension and more with real concern.

  As they passed the natural gate formed by the two earthen hills, Iyana saw why. The ground dropped away sharply, the tracks the company had left forming shallow depressions the rain was quick to fill. She saw the twin rivers the wagons had left behind. They looked like gutters running with the same slop she’d seen in the alleys of Hearth or among the fishing houses of Last Lake.

  At the bottom, the sand flattened some, appearing similar to the cracked plains they had crossed to the east, closer to the land called Center. Far ahead—or perhaps not so far as she thought—she saw what looked like great gray towers. Squinting, she recognized them as great slabs of stone, not man-made but birthed of nature. They loomed across the horizon, standing as silent sentinels atop the flatlands.

  “Come, Iyana!”

  Karin was at the bottom, helping to free the cart that always seemed to be lagging behind the other. At least now it had some excuse, the mules unable to extricate it from the deeper trench it dug from the lead wagon’s grooves.

  She felt a pass
ing fear seeing how far away they had got—the lead wagon and the main congregation of riders and walkers were nearly to the first of the leaning towers.

  Iyana waved to Karin and started down, doing her best to avoid stepping into the sloshing mess to either side. At least she had three sets of traveling clothes stowed away with the rest. And if they had been borrowed, she’d borrow someone else’s. They were a single thing, now. That was what the captain said. The caravan was like a caterpillar moving inch by laborious inch across an unforgiving, sun-bleached land.

  What she wouldn’t give to have that sun shining now.

  “You drifted.”

  She had reached the lower ground without noticing and raised her chin to see Karin staring down at her. He wore a smile, but she knew he was concerned.

  “It seems I did,” she said. “Good thing I have the First Runner looking after me.”

  His eyes tracked the swelling dunes they’d passed over and around, his look changing into the one she knew came most naturally.

  “Do you fear them?” she asked, moving to stand beside him.

  “The desert foxes?” She could see a pair making their easy, bounding path over the gate they’d just passed through. One stopped to drink from the trough the wagons had dug while the other stood and stared back at them, red tail flicking. Iyana couldn’t tell if it was a warning or something lighter.

  “They are everywhere,” Karin said, his voice sounding distant as he scanned. “I’m past the point of thinking that to be coincidence.”

  Iyana had to laugh. It helped her focus less on the wind and driving rain—at least it was keeping her hair out of her eyes at this angle—and more on the obvious tension of the man beside her.

  “The others have gone ahead,” she said, touching him on the elbow. He kept his sleeves rolled up, exposing scars she had never noticed before. It wasn’t all about running for him, she knew. The Valley had known plenty of blood and bad before the Dark Kind came in number, and Karin had known plenty of it.