The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  She thought it looked the color of poisoned blood tonight, and felt sick as she sought out the cleansing warmth of the fire between the wagons.

  Karin woke before the others. Well, most of them.

  Creyath stood on the edge of the camp, his back to the rest. He stood just outside the shortened shadow of the great slab, out on the ribbed surface of the sand that had changed from muddy brown to patched yellow in the new light of dawn.

  The Ember never seemed to sleep. Perhaps it was owing to the ease with which he lived his life. The ease with which he rode his black charger across the wind-swept dunes just as easily as he had over the rock-strewn fields before Hearth. The same ease with which the western rises clashed with the latent power held beneath. Karin had had the privilege of witnessing Creyath’s power firsthand on two occasions now. Neither had been pleasant.

  As he rolled up his bedroll—little more than a canvas flap and the thicker shirt he’d brought from home to use as a pillow—and slipped on his black boots, Karin eased the tension that had built in the night. He never slept long, and as each bend in his morning routine elicited a pop or snap, he was reminded why.

  Karin moved over the sleeping camp like a ghost might, quieter even than the desert foxes that had been too timid to venture beneath the shaded expanse they sheltered in, though he could see their tracks just outside the crescent. Captain Talmir stirred. He would be waking soon, and Karin meant to be back from his ranging before the caravan had a chance to order itself and break the line of dunes he meant to first.

  He sought out the horses, which were collected between one of the wagons and the jagged edges of the tumble beside the spur, and smiled to see that they had finally admitted the merchants’ mules into their esteemed company.

  “Not easy, I know,” he said as he stroked a chestnut mare on the snout—the one Iyana tended to ride. His thoughts turned to the two they’d lost to the horrors in the sandy bowl, the first casualties of a fool’s quest if ever there was one.

  The first.

  He tried to shake the thought and moved away from the animals, the chestnut mare giving him a snort and nudge as he did.

  As he rounded the wagon, he peered in through a slit in the canvas and saw Iyana curled on a sack of oats beside the water casks. Her face was locked in a frown, and Karin worried that something was amiss. Until now, she had preferred to sleep out beneath the stars in the company of the horses and other riders—even the Faeykin, who seemed to pay her less mind than they did the rest of the company. She had spoken to Sen, the strangest of the lot, the night before, and Karin felt a fatherly swell that had him considering striking up his own conversation with the man when the opportunity next presented itself.

  “Sleep doesn’t agree with you, does it, Mit’Ahn?” Karin said as he stepped up beside the Ember. He delighted in the kiss of the morning light as he broke the plane from shadow to sand, though he knew he would come to loathe it soon enough.

  Creyath showed him the smile that was never far from his face, the effect of his orange eyes somewhat dimmed in the bright of day.

  “I sleep in pieces,” Creyath said, turning back to the west. He did not elaborate and Karin did not need him to. He could appreciate a man of few words. After all, Sarise had always had plenty for the both of them.

  As he did every morning, he closed his eyes and faced the direction of the sun, though it had yet to rise over the great gray stone that had been their silent guardian in the storm. Even still, he knew its arc, and he called up an image of the only woman he’d ever loved. It was never slow in coming, and while the hair had been the thing most had remembered about her, Karin liked her nose best and how it had drawn any observer up to those shocking greens. She always had a different expression when she arrived each morning. Today, she looked concerned, her brows drawn together in a way that mixed frustration with a slow anger like only she could.

  And there was a touch of fear to it. A quiver to the lips that gave him pause. But Sarise A’zu feared nothing. She never had. He liked to think that was true right up until the end.

  “She was something,” Creyath said as Karin sighed without meaning to.

  “Most in the Valley remember her fire,” Karin said, opening his eyes. “It’s the only thing I’d like to forget about her.”

  “Ah,” Creyath said, “but in my memory of her—limited though it may be—she was her fire.” Karin would have liked him to explain this time, but let it drop. He might like to think of her, but speaking brought the hurt out, and Karin had enough of that to last a lifetime. He’d seen enough of it on the face of his son, heard it deep into the nights for years on end, as if Kole was burning up along with her right up until his own fire woke.

  Something of prophecy, Doh’Rah had said. There was something of prophecy to that boy and his mother. And though Tu’Ren’s father had been the one to say it, it was the way Mother Ninyeva had stayed quiet that Karin remembered. Her silence spoke. It said plenty.

  Karin tucked his loose black shirt into his matching, tight-fitting trousers and checked his belt. He pulled his long knife free from its sheath with his left hand and held it at eye level. He kept it horizontal and then tilted it, bringing it close. Its edges were clean, the oil in the leather doing its work well despite the sand and coarseness of the land they now found themselves in. Despite the burning ichors it had worn as it exited the skull of the land drake two days before.

  He replaced the blade and stepped forward, the wind blowing his black bangs in a reminder that his tie had snapped during their flight.

  “Be careful today, Reyna,” Creyath said, and the way he said it had Karin pausing for a moment. He did not turn, but rather waited for the Ember to speak again. Surprisingly, he did. “I have been watching those dunes since the sun rose.”

  “And?” Karin asked, staring from west to north, where the other spurs and great gray slabs jutted up like the bones of long-dead titans.

  “Nothing,” Creyath said. “There has been nothing, and more of it than in the days prior.”

  It was as cryptic as anything else the Second Keeper of Hearth was wont to say, but Karin took its meaning well enough. He moved off at a walk that soon changed into a jog, which became an alternating dash.

  Slow-fast-slow. Fast-slow. Up-down-up. Down-side.

  It was a cadence he had developed when learning alongside the other Runners during his training on the edges of the Untamed Hills. His teachers had taken the younger scouts to the most densely-forested lands of the southern Valley, their games seeming pointless at a time when the only enemies they had need to fear were imagined. The Dark Kind had not come in years, with no rifts opening in the Valley since Karin was a boy, and even then, never more than a pack.

  As he ran, his boots breaking through the thin crust of the undulating desert surface to expose the dust beneath, Karin thought of those early days. He thought of how he had laughed when one of the other Runners had fallen during their many challenges—chasing deer or black hares. He thought of how the same man had fallen years later under the pursuit of a band of Rivermen led by a Rockbled, a brute as impossibly fast as he was strong.

  Karin had kept running, then. He had orders. And he had never run so fast. In the ensuing years of conflict—the three tribes of the Valley finding it difficult to coexist through one misunderstanding or another that led to blood and the liberal sharing of it—many Runners fell and less were willing to take up the mantle. Until, when he was old enough and felt wise enough to have a son, Karin was named First Runner.

  Until that fateful night he had come upon the Dark Kind, and became the last.

  He had run then, too. The Runners knew their code. They knew the twin towns and the Scattered Villages alike had to be warned. They carried out their charge and Karin carried out his. It just so happened that they died doing it. None joined the next wave to call themselves Runners. There was only one.

  He had always been fast. Sometimes, he wished he wasn’t.

  Before he kn
ew it, Karin had split the first pair of dunes. He was still amazed at the little differences such a land of sameness could display. After all, sand was sand, no matter how you piled it. And yet, the rows and ridges of dunes great and small—hillocks and eddies, pits and burrows—made it a land at once immediate and unknowable to outsiders.

  But not to all.

  He stopped at the foot of a dune whose sand still ran in small currents, unaffected by the wind that was only just beginning to carry the heat of the day. The desert foxes had been out, their paw prints dotting the rise before him. He looked for them at the top but saw no silhouettes, and as he turned in a slow circle, he saw that he was in the middle of a rounded bowl beset by tall piles on all sides. Each of them ran with its own small rivers of earth, and Karin felt unnerved despite the poise his body displayed.

  He crouched as he heard the suggestion of voices on the wind, thinking he had been lured or trapped. A change in the currents of air and he whirled, knife screaming toward the throat of his attacker.

  He froze.

  Directly before him sat one of the thin canines that had shadowed them throughout their trek. The fox regarded him with speckled eyes; yellow, with flecks of lavender. Karin breathed out slowly and withdrew the knife, straightening as the fox stared, tongue lolling as it panted.

  A yip drew his attention upwards. Atop the dune he’d examined moments before, the rest of the pack watched him. These were far more nervous than the one sitting before him. They yipped and barked—seemingly at their fellow more than Karin—pacing and loping in tight, crossing patterns as they made ready to move on from the stranger.

  Karin nodded at the one who sat, feeling strange to do it but stranger to not, and turned on his heel, meaning to strike out north before circling back to the east to catch the caravan out on the spur-topped flat. As he did, the fox made a growling sound. It was too high-pitched to threaten like Shifa or one of the wall hounds of the Lake, but it was disturbing nonetheless.

  “What?” Karin asked, twisting around to get a look and blading his body in the case of an attack. He kept the pack in his periphery. He didn’t think they’d make for something as big as him or even half as deadly, but this seemed a land that made desperate things.

  The fox was standing now. It seemed to be looking beyond him, toward the spurs and rocky rises that merged with the dunes to the north.

  Karin took it as a warning, and dipped a bow that did not feel half as foolish as the question he’d asked.

  He moved between the dunes, feeling suddenly exposed in the vast closeness. The sand stretched endlessly in every direction, but the rises and falls made for perfect ambush zones. In times such as these Karin trusted his instincts, which always came down to a choice between two extremes: fast, or slow.

  Slow.

  He crept more than walked, passing between two piles that rose higher than the tallest buildings of Hearth. The foxes were behind him, now, which made the loose slides of pouring sand that fell around him an accident of the wind or anything but. Karin hugged the eastern dune and rounded its base, looking more out of the corners of his eyes than straight ahead.

  The next gap opened into a shallow canyon ringed on all sides by sharp-peaked hills of sand that formed a wall more than a row, the crust from yesterday’s rain undisturbed by animal tracks. In the center of the bowl, bits of white flashed as the sun neared its zenith—loose stones unearthed in the wind that carved the place. Or bones.

  Karin kept his body side-on toward the center as he half-crept, half-crawled up the eastern wall, which crumbled under his weight and had him sliding as often as climbing. The sand here was different than it had been, the loose stuff beneath the shell thinner than that he’d felt before, less coarse and easier to slip or catch. Heart quickening, he began to scale a more horizontal path, seeking fresh crust with which to climb lest he fall too far. He did not think about going back the way he’d come. He knew better than that.

  As Karin neared the top, he froze, hearing something on the wind apart from the howl between the crags just over the next ridge. It sounded like a keening wail, angry and in pain. He renewed his scramble, then froze again, seeing the bright sand around him drenched in a shadow shaped like a man.

  Karin did not wait for the stroke to fall. Instead, he planted as best he could in the slipping surface and caught a stone beneath his boot by good fortune. He used it to propel himself back in a desperate fall that was just a hair quicker than the lunge the figure made for him. As the open air greeted his back, he saw the stranger framed against the afternoon sun and the blue skies that ringed it. He was dark of skin—not unlike Karin himself—and mostly bare but for ragged clothes and scales to cover the rest. His eyes were more white than anything else, and crazed, but it was his teeth that stood out. In place of bleached white or yellowed decay, they were red, a color that matched the patterns painted across his skin, dark and rotted in hue.

  The bottom of the rounded pit was harder than Karin had anticipated. He landed with a force that jarred him and set him coughing. He only noticed the shards littering his back as he rolled, the sharp pains lancing like glass. He came to stand and whipped his long knife free, and now he heard the chanting renewed and emboldened.

  He spun in quick circles as the figures detached themselves from the bright canvas of the sky to ring him atop the deathly canyon. The sounds of crunching beneath his feet dispelled any lingering doubt: this ground had been dug, and the crunching and snapping things beneath him had been trapped as he was now. He did not spare a glance to see if they had belonged to man or beast.

  The figures—perhaps a dozen—all appeared in a similar state to the one who’d attacked him. They stood on bowed legs, eyes wild. They were thin and gangly and varied in height, though their complexions were equally matched. Now he saw a bit of yellow pallor beneath the brown. These men and women were sick, and—Karin knew without knowing—beyond saving.

  He only hoped the same was not true for him as the chanting rolled in from the north and the blood-toothed savages made for him, beginning their slides as if they’d done it a thousand times before. They rode the sand, clutching their bone-white blades and jagged lengths of obsidian they might have picked up on the way, and they snarled and spat like cats with mange.

  The desert foxes voiced their complaints, their howls mixing strangely with the rhythmic chanting and turning it into a discordant sound that seemed to make the red-tooths waver. They expected him to run, as all pack creatures do when they leave an opening, and Karin still had his. He saw the gap through which he’d entered the trap and cursed himself a fool for not recognizing it as the only one.

  But he would not run. Despite what his title implied, being First Runner did not mean being the fastest or the most agile. It did not mean endurance or fortitude or will, though it did encompass all those things. It meant, quite simply, knowing when to run, and in which direction.

  Karin chose forward.

  As the first of the gangly men reached the basin, loose stones tumbling as he worked to steady himself, Karin didn’t let him. He speared forward faster than a wolf—almost as fast as an Ember with hot blood—and in spite of his hatred of killing he took some measure of satisfaction in seeing the man’s eyes widen as Karin’s blade found a path up behind them through his chin.

  Before he could fall, Karin spun, flinging the broken dead thing before the path of the next two—snarling, vicious women who clutched blades longer than he wanted to meet. He chose the next in line, and even as he ducked a desperate strike and recognized the lack of martial skill brought against him, he knew he could not win out.

  He stabbed this one in the gut and pushed up, putting shoulder to chest with enough force to jar the bones and get the blood pumping—out rather than in—and then leapt past, putting his back to the west-facing slope as ten enemies formed a crescent around him.

  One dead and another dying, and now the rest knew his speed and his cunning. Even with the discordant melodies from the norther
n crags and whatever wild stuff the foxes put up, they would fall on him and rend him apart.

  How many would he kill? Less than if he’d been younger.

  “Do you speak?” Karin asked. The answer was the next one darting in. He gave her a gash that cut to the bone and her next snarl almost sounded like a word, albeit one of pain and anger. He spun away and the pack adjusted, bending around him, his initial aggression now rewarded by the hesitance wolves showed around a bull elk.

  Karin was nearly caught between beats as his attackers proved their cunning. One leaned in with a prod. He carried the longest weapon—a curved spear that looked as though it might be a broken bow with a sharpened edge. Karin dodged, recognizing the feint too late to avoid damage but soon enough to avoid death as another scored a hit that opened a wound along his side to match those screaming across his back. He felt the blood mixing with the sweat and wondered whether the blades or the heat would kill him first.

  A sound like the whoosh of wings cut through the chanting, and a shadow carrying a new brightness soared. It was a streaking comet—one of Creyath’s flaming shafts—and it burst in a blinding flare that trailed motes of flame and Everwood and sent the tribesmen scattering, their looks a mix of awe and fear.

  Karin did not waste the opportunity. He shot forward, scoring a slice that parted the neck of one even as he ducked a desperate counter from another. He tripped forward, rolled back to standing. Back to running. He only noticed that the conjured sounds of chanting and the foxes’ collective howls had ceased when he reached the gap, only to find it blocked by a form he recognized even if he didn’t know.

  He slid to a halt before the man. He was tall and well-muscled. A leaner version of the Rivermen of the south and with a lighter coloring that had been baked red-bronze in the unforgiving sun. They paused there for half a breath and the man—whose eyes were silver—gray—raised his hand too quickly to mean anything but harm.

  Karin ducked, heart catching as he rolled. He lanced his leg out, meaning to take the stranger’s feet out from under him, and screamed in agony when his shin met what felt like a mountain face. He rolled away and came up, only to fall back down, and then he saw the mess the stranger had made of the lead savage.