The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  “What is it?” Talmir asked.

  Pevah shrugged. “Your Ember friend,” he said.

  “Creyath Mit’Ahn.”

  “The very same. He could draw them here, if any could.” He paused, turning it over. “If anything, it will only redouble their resolve. Keep them on their current path, however misguided. However dogged.” He showed his teeth as he said it, the last bit coming out in close to a growl.

  The Sage of the Red Waste met Talmir’s eyes and then spun back to the west. The sun was not so hateful today as it had been. It wore on Talmir’s skin and turned the horizon to haze, bidding the yellow-brown dunes sway beneath it, a still ocean set in motion.

  “I know what you would ask of me, Talmir Caru, and I know why you would ask it.” Talmir thought to speak but bit his tongue. Pevah did not turn. “But we have a charge, and it is out at the Midnight Dunes. They glow like hearts beneath the stars. That is what the witches and their blood-toothed warriors are after. That is what we protect, and that is why, as long as we stay here, we are safe. The children below us are safe.”

  Talmir thoughts were spinning. It sounded like nonsense to him. Like poetry.

  “These Seers cling to prophecies they think lost and rediscovered,” Pevah said. “They believe the secret to the Ember fire is beneath those dunes, and that I have kept it from them and bestowed it on my chosen children. They seek the fire as if it is something to be taken.”

  Like power, in all its forms.

  Talmir’s face colored in shame. What was he here to do, if not the same? Talmir shook the thought and cleared his throat.

  “What does it have to do with you?” he asked.

  “It has everything to do with me, I’m afraid.” He did not elaborate, and Talmir was growing impatient.

  “Why guard something that isn’t there?” he asked, stepping forward. “Let them go. What is it, some sort of sacred ground? Let it go.”

  Pevah looked down at the lower shelf where the cave mouth opened.

  “The Ember fire is not there. But we guard something worse at the Midnight Dunes. Something best left there. Something I have struggled to keep.”

  “What is it?” Talmir asked, feeling like a child on the edges of the fire, leaning in to one of Sister Piell’s stories but afraid to lean too far.

  Another laugh, this one with just a tinge of mania. The wind picked up and sent a chill down Talmir’s spine despite the warmth.

  “They think it’s their Ember god,” he said, seemingly speaking to himself more than Talmir. “No. No, no. It is something older. Something worse.”

  “And you are its minders?” Talmir nearly spat. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. “That is why you won’t join us. That is why you won’t fight against the others who hold the World—even with its Landkist—under their sway? What will the Eastern Dark unleash if he’s left unchecked? Who will stop him, if not you?”

  “They hold less power than they believe,” Pevah said, though he sounded regretful.

  “Tell that to the children of the Valley core,” Talmir said. “Tell it to those in the east, who live beneath the gray towers of the tyrant there, the Sage of Balon Rael. I assume he’s real, as well?”

  “All too real.” He sighed. “Talmir. I do not have the power you think I do. Whatever I have, it’s needed here. Perhaps T’Alon Rane did.”

  “What does whatever’s out there matter if the World ends?” Talmir asked. He sounded frantic, and hated it. “What does it matter if the World Apart keeps coming back every season when the sun sinks below the horizon? When the Dark Kind rip our babes from their beds and tear our lives apart?”

  “We have a charge,” Pevah said, and though Talmir wanted to rant and rave, something in the old man’s bearing made him hesitate.

  “What can we do?” Talmir asked. He asked it quietly because he did not mean to ask it at all.

  “Endure. It is what the Landkist are for, I think. It is what the people of the World were made to do.”

  He sounded sick and Talmir felt sick, as if his whole mission—his foolish dream—was crumbling like a castle made all of thatch and loose sticks.

  Pevah—who was not Pevah at that time—turned on his heel and stalked past Talmir without meeting his eyes. Talmir nearly reached a hand out to stop him, but something in the look—the intent, or the glint of a steely eye—stayed his hand.

  Just before he reached the stairwell, which looked like nothing more than a hole they’d crawled out of, the old man stopped and heaved another sigh that made him smaller.

  “Their teeth are stained red because they drink the blood of their own,” he said. “They will win the war of attrition. But not now. Not while I’m here.” He took one step down. “I will not send you and yours home, Talmir Caru. Stay, or go. I say stay, though you must be disappointed.”

  Anger was the word, and Talmir would try to stop it spreading to rage. He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath as the old man retreated to his cavernous hall beneath the sand. Talmir looked to the west, his eyes straining past the shimmering swells. He could not tell if it was a trick of his mind or of the sun, but the sky looked bloody that way.

  Iyana had felt the mood of the captain before he had descended the day before. She could feel it now, coming off him like waves of heat from the sands they’d walked across on the way here. It felt like disappointment, with a touch of loathing. Even without dipping into the Between, Iyana felt it.

  She felt the mood of the caravan shift and buckle under the weight of Talmir Caru’s guilt and anger. He did not speak. He did not rage against the old Sage, nor against his charges. He did not express what had been said, but all among them knew what had been refused. They had found what they were looking for when they set out from the Valley core, but it seemed they would return empty-handed and absent news of power moving for them, for a change, and against the Eastern Dark.

  Still, it wasn’t all bad.

  Karin had made remarkable progress in the days following the attack. The other Faeykin had stopped ministering to him, and though he denied it to Iyana, she knew it was because he had refused them. He still moved about with a halting gait, his wounds stretched tight over skin that was only recently mended. Talmir had given him orders to stay within the complex. He’d given them all the same. Where else they would go, Iyana was not one for guessing. And so, she made the best of it. After a day of the captain’s infectious sulking, the men and women under his command did as well.

  The children helped. Iyana watched them play on the edges of the lake at midday. The soldiers had grown bored with their constant chatter and had moved up, seeking out the solace provided by the wind and sun atop the shelves, or perhaps to mind the horses that did not need minding. But Iyana delighted in the sounds, just as she delighted in the laughter that bubbled out of them each time one of the little ones caught her staring in their direction.

  She waved at them and they tried to wave her over, but she had found a bit of rock that sat just below a skylight and was loath to move. She looked up and lost her gaze to the brightness, the fury of the sun dampened by the moisture of the cave. The birds twittered and sang as they flew from one nook to the next, and Iyana thought they were similar to the folk who sheltered beneath them.

  “What should we do?”

  Iyana turned toward the speaker. It was Ket. He sat on the lower stair with Jes beside him. Mial had gone off with Karin, shadowing the First Runner as he set to exploring the various offshoots. Pevah had told them it was safe, though Iyana had tried to forbid it.

  Jes ignored Ket because he’d asked the same question twice that morning. He’d been asking it since Talmir had come back, his initial hopefulness turning to a restlessness that grew with each passing hour.

  “The captain will try again,” Iyana said. She smiled. “He probably is now, as we speak.” She hadn’t seen Pevah or Talmir since the night before, and imagined they were embroiled in another talk that bordered argument before devolving into verbal warfar
e. None among the company had actually heard them speak, but they could see it in the way one left and another followed, in the way one returned and the other long after, grumbling words that ran together and whose meaning was clear as the water in the obsidian pools about them.

  Ket did not look mollified. If anything, his shoulders sagged a little more, and the sigh he released this time was enough to get Jes up and moving.

  “How’s your arm?” Iyana asked her as she passed.

  “Fine. Thank you,” she said. “Got to find a tunnel with more air than this one.” Iyana smiled at her back, then briefly turned her gaze to Ket before giving him up as a hopeless cause.

  The merchants had stretched out their parchments and canvas wraps and were cataloging their tools—all things they had brought. Things for map-making and for digging. Things for finding new things that they had yet to find. Iyana pitied them, in a way. How disappointed they looked. How forlorn, knowing the older traders of Hearth had been right to warn them of the uncertain road. At the same time, she had to admit a grudging respect that they had come at all. After all, who was she to judge? She, who had never before defended lake or wall from the Dark Kind. She, who had sheltered when her friends and family fought and died.

  She pushed the thought aside and tried to find a new one. Each time she looked at one of their hosts—be they red-sashes with brown skin or silver-cloaks with white—she felt a sadness, for something lost and for something never known. Something unspeakable. Neither group could be described as joyful, but the gray moved as if they were in a daze, like hounds awaiting the commands of their master.

  But there was something else. The wind Jes had been looking for swept down from one of the alcoves above and brought no birdsong with it. It made her skin prickle, though it was not cold, and Iyana began to sway until she forced herself to stop.

  “Why do you stop?”

  She whirled, only realizing she had drifted to the center of the open chamber when she noted eyes fixed on her from all directions. The children had stopped their splashing in the shallow water and the nomads watched from their corners and perches. Even her own people frowned, and Ket had half-risen as if he feared for her safety.

  Verna stood directly before her, the Faeykin’s pale features striking under her shock of red hair. Her green eyes sparkled with intent.

  “Sorry?” Iyana said, fighting with the acoustics of the vaulted ceilings and mirrored black arches to keep her voice low. The eyes turned away—most of them—and left the strange Faeykin to their strange talk.

  “Why do you stop?” Verna asked, doing nothing to keep her own voice low. “You began to dip. The others wonder why you fight it. Courlis believes you fear the Between. Sen will not say what he believes, though I know he has spoken with you.”

  Was that a hint of jealousy?

  “Why would one of the Faeykin fear the Between?” The question was leading, and Verna’s look suggested she knew. Iyana did not answer. “Unless,” Verna purred, her head tilting in a way that was aloof and strange as the rest of her, “you cannot control the paths. I wonder what the old woman taught you?”

  Iyana felt her blood near to boiling and worked to cool it. She could have been an Ember in that moment, all rage and spitting fire. As it was, only the slight twitching of a brow betrayed her, though Verna could see it plain enough.

  “You remember what they called her, don’t you?” Iyana asked. “You remember what they called the old woman who taught me?”

  Verna’s mouth was a tight line.

  “The Faey Mother,” Iyana said. She leaned in and showed her teeth, and Verna stepped back. Iyana smiled—the look of a wolf. It was something Ninyeva would have done. “She had more power than any of the strange masters that kept you in the western woods of the Valley. You know why they hated her, Verna? Because she didn’t seek power. She didn’t try to take it. It found her, and it became her.”

  Now Verna’s face betrayed her. The eyes in the chamber were fixed on them, or else turned purposefully away. Iyana didn’t mind it. Not now.

  “You would equate yourself with the Faey Mother?” Verna said. Iyana smiled wider, and she thought the older woman who was not so much older might reach out and strike her.

  “I would,” Iyana said, adding, “I am her legacy, after all. None of you can claim the same.”

  Verna made a sound like a hissing cat and turned on her heel, stalking back toward her dimly-lit chamber and its pretentious company with which Iyana wanted nothing to do. Iyana watched her go, red hair trailing like one of the nomads’ scarves. She saw Creyath regarding her with an expressionless face as he chewed on a hunk of dried and salted meat. He gave the slightest of bows that may well have been a victory bell, and Iyana could not help but smile again.

  Still, the attention was too much. She felt like a lone desert flower in a storm. The children giggled behind her, the sort of nervous laughter reserved for the silent observation of disagreements between the grown. Iyana spun sharply on them, hands out, and they screamed and slipped from the shelf, splashing and wriggling in the shallows. Iyana gave chase, her heart leaping as it hadn’t in months as they led her in a merry chase through the twisting pathways and filtered, glittering trails beneath the sands.

  Soon enough, the chase stopped, and now Iyana followed them as they hopped and skipped, ducked and crept through crevices and sloping ramps.

  “Not so far,” she said, feeling strange as they left the sunlit chamber and its lapping lake behind. Her trousers were soaked through from the wading and running, but she was not out of breath. She felt a pride that had as much to do with that as it did the thought of what Ninyeva would have made of her conversation.

  Iyana Ve’Ran was no longer merely a Faeykin of the Valley. No longer waiting on the edge of a nightmare to tend to those who fought the dark. She was out in the World, now, and no matter what might come of their path, she counted it a victory, for her if for nothing else.

  A stab of panic hit her as she lost the filtered light above, the tunnels and wind-carved paths howling as they moved away from the lake, their bottoms slick but no longer carrying pools of their own.

  “Hello?” She had lost the children, though she caught glimpses of them: a flash of red through a gap in the stalagmites and a wisp of silver-gray as one leapt through an errant ray. If they hadn’t been trailing their innocent joviality, they’d have frightened her like the savages Karin had fought.

  “Back to the lake with you, now,” she said in a matronly voice that almost had her rolling her eyes at herself. She came to a bend and nearly yelped when she saw the collection of little ones standing in a clutch atop a rounded stone with lavender moss all around it. It was a cross-section of sorts, with passageways forking off in four directions. The children stared down the one she thought faced south.

  “What is it?” she asked. Her voice startled a girl in the back, who spun on her only to smile nervously, her pale face coloring.

  Iyana hunched down to their level, squeezing in behind them. No birds sang in the deeper corridors, and though he would have been silent even if he were here, she knew Mial had not come this way. The children seemed hesitant to go farther in, as if they waited on the edge of some beast’s lair. The air was warmer, here. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now that the wind and water were behind, the close tunnels felt stifling.

  “Pevah.” The little girl she’d startled said it in an awed tone and backed away. The smaller children mirrored her, though those in front, the older ones, stayed rooted for longer, as if on a dare. As a collective, their playful demeanor had shifted, turning to a testing curiosity that was colored by fear.

  Iyana felt herself sway and did not try to stop it this time. She had been avoiding contact with the Between ever since Sen’s lesson, if that was what he would call it. She felt somehow infected by his dispassion.

  Some of the children moved away from her while others crowded closer. Some regarded her strangely, though not with suspicion, as she began t
o sing that strange hum she never knew she was making until she was. The boys in front continued to stare down the dim tunnel ahead, which seemed to bend in and expand like the throat of some primordial behemoth.

  The lights were comforting as they sprouted and waved around her like the plants that glowed beneath the docks of Last Lake, the children’s tethers bright and swaying in time with each other. Despite their differing hues, there was nothing separating the brown from the white. All of them glowed with a yellow that recalled soft sunlight.

  Iyana concentrated on the pathway ahead. She noticed a new glow, and tried to block the rest out. She thought of leaving her body entirely and seeing what she could find on paths she hadn’t traveled since the Valley, but she feared to do so without a guiding hand. She feared to do so without Ninyeva.

  “Red.”

  The little girl who spoke it was clutching Iyana’s hand with clammy paws.

  “How can you see it?” Iyana said distractedly. She was only just beginning to make out the blood-colored wisps that crept around the edges and brushed the black stones.

  “Young ones!”

  If the shout hadn’t done it, the combined shrieking of a dozen children surely would have. Iyana heard the sound with heightened senses and fell to her knees as the children ran back the way they’d come, trailing their screams and hysterical laughter. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the buzzing as the haze of unreality cleared. It should not have bothered her this much. She had only just touched it—extended her senses and sought the tethers, like standing in the shallows along the shore rather than submerging, but still she felt the waves hit her.

  When the sensation finally subsided, she felt a presence and fell back, sliding down the rounded floor before firm hands caught her and hoisted her with inhuman strength.

  “Care yourself,” the old man said, setting her down as if she were one of the children. He smiled at her, but his eyes were searching. She thought she saw the tracks of tears, but saw no moisture. She smiled up at him, sheepish and afraid.