The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  Sen shook his head and blew out a sigh. “I wondered, as I fell. Am I a monster, too? A monster protecting children from other monsters?”

  The silence he left behind was not something easy to fill, but Iyana said the only words that came to her mind.

  “If the only monsters in the World were as wicked as you, Sen, I think you’d never have a need to heal or to regret not knowing how.”

  His face was blank until the smallest smile broke it. It felt brighter to her than any sun above.

  “I have to thank you,” he said, and before she could wave it away, “not for saving me, though that goes without saying. If it hadn’t been for your warning, we would have been caught unawares even worse than we already were.”

  Iyana rocked back on her heels and tilted her head.

  “Your signal,” he said, waving his hand about his head. He frowned at her reaction. “You didn’t mean to call out?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her mind replaying the events at the Mother’s Heart. “They came for me just as they came for you. I did what I could.”

  Sen regarded her with something that skirted by fear and settled on awe. Iyana wasn’t sure which she would have preferred.

  “Such a talent,” he said, shaking his head back and forth slowly. “I heard you before I heard the witch’s song. Yours was like a silver bell—or a horn blaring. The others felt it as well—Verna and Courlis. We called out a warning before the first of them broke the shadows in the deeper dark. Those who were not still above atop the shelf and sand already had weapons in hand when the first wave hit.”

  Iyana remembered what had felt like a war of wills, her own straining against the conjured, rotted song of the witches in their faraway cave that felt so close. She had screamed in her own head to drown it out. Perhaps that was what Sen and the others had heard. And if they had heard …

  She suppressed a shiver, trying not to think on the crones in their bloody caverns.

  “You look better,” she said, changing the subject. She swayed a bit and found the Between waiting very close, felt the fire greet her eyes as she looked him over. His own eyes remained dull and his tether was dimmer than usual, the greenish-yellow thread swaying in time with the swirling motes. It was untucked and unbound, riding whatever currents it would.

  He met her eyes and shrugged. “Perhaps I’m taking after you,” he said.

  She smiled at him. “How do you mean?” She let the vision drop and blinked away the ghost light.

  “I’ve long kept my tether guarded,” he said, hugging his knees closer in a way that covered the fresh scars on his neck and made him appear as one of the children. “When I woke, I found myself wondering why. I tried to remember, and while I can’t focus on a single time, I think it started when I discovered what I was capable of.” He could see she didn’t want to guess. He made a pulling motion with one hand and let out a humorless laugh. “When you’ve pulled another, you don’t want to be pulled back.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe the Faey Mother never told me of this power,” she said. “She taught me to heal—to join my energy to those afflicted and help relieve them. I always wondered why it drained me so. I think I’m beginning to see why.”

  Sen watched her, his expression unreadable. “Would that I had spent my time in the pursuit of healing,” he said. “Would that I had not discovered the darker ways the Kin of Faeyr could turn.”

  He was tired and he seemed to say it without forethought, but it called up too many questions at once. Iyana settled on a pair. “You cannot heal?” she asked. “And that word: I’ve never heard it said that way.”

  He smirked. “The Valley has a name, Iyana,” he said. He did not seem to mean it in a harsh way. “At least, it did, long ago. Long before any kind that made us got there. I think, even by the standards we’ve seen of the Landkist we know—the Embers, the Rockbled, even the man this Sage calls his knight—that Valley has ever been the strangest. According to some of the Faey—elders among the old—they were the first of the World’s Landkist. The rest are just shadows on the wall … and the Embers bright lights that carve them up.”

  Sen had not answered the first question, but Iyana let it pass.

  “I don’t understand this power,” she said, turning her hands over as if looking might reveal answers. “But for the first time, I think I see how it’s all connected.” She looked up at him, expecting to see that sure, condescending look she had come to expect. Instead, he merely listened.

  “The power we have,” she said, hesitant but growing surer as she went, “it’s not the power to heal or the power to kill, though it can be. Maybe it’s what the elders among the old have known all along, but I think, Sen, that these eyes see life itself in a way others cannot. I think these hands,” she took his in her own; they were cold and damp and she tried to warm them. “I think they can push it and pull it, cut it short, help it along. Just as the Embers wield the flame and the Rockbled the earth—and just as Ceth wields his own presence, his weight, like the sharpest and strongest hammer I’ve ever seen—so do we wield the power over the light most never see, even if they know it’s there.”

  Sen was nodding along. He had adopted something close to that wild, intense look he had worn in the cave to the east, when he had drained that very light from a desert flower. There was a want coming off him even now that disappointed her even as it horrified her. Only now, she could see the war he fought against it. The war he had been fighting for as long as he had discovered his power. It was a look that reminded her of Kole.

  There are many kinds of fire, Ninyeva had said to her once. And no matter its color, fire burns.

  “I always felt drained after healing at the Lake,” she said. “Now, I think I finally understand why. It wasn’t that I was pulling some power from another place to knit cuts and soothe burns. I was pouring myself in. I think it’s why I felt sick after holding the Pale Men at bay. There is a joining—of wills, maybe.” She paused. “I never used to see the tethers. Not really. Not until I first searched out my sister in the Deep Lands.”

  Iyana was speaking more to herself than Sen, but still he listened, taking in everything he could.

  “You know,” he said, “I’m not sure we all see it in the same way.”

  She gave him a questioning look.

  “Tethers is a word,” he said, “but I’ve always thought of it like a cloak, or a shroud.” He laughed, and this one sounded more genuine than the one before. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, if it comes to the same. Still, I wonder if we each see that inner light in a different way. I wonder how Mother Ninyeva saw it, and whether she got her hands wrapped up in it like we have.”

  Iyana nodded as if it all made sense. She remembered Ninyeva walking toward the heart of a living storm, and thought of how her eyes had glowed brighter than the most blinding flashes of blue-white within it. Did she pull on a tether or strike a thread? It seemed trivial, that a being such as the White Crest would have a puppet’s string like all the rest. And she thought of the old man who was the Red Waste and the tendrils that had come from him in sixes.

  “Will is the word,” Sen said. “You said it before, and I think you’re right. At least, I think you’ve a piece of it. After all, what is life if not will and all the things it moves and sets to crash together?”

  Iyana heard raised voices as people passed by the doorway, children trailing in their wake. It had the familiar and comfortable sounds of an argument between mother and child. The shaft of light in the room’s center had dimmed somewhat, the sun moving in its slow arc heedless of those below.

  “No matter how you did it, or why,” Iyana said without turning back, “you did a good thing, Sen. Children are alive because of you.”

  He didn’t answer but stood, slow and halting. She did as well.

  “The rest are moving with purpose,” he said, nodding toward the doorway. “Will you truly join them on the road to the west?” />
  A flash of bloody purple against the horizon. Drums beating in a way that reminded her of the Deep Lands. Mountains of red light and black flames that burned the sand and turned it to glass.

  “I haven’t come here to hide from what we might find,” Iyana said. She didn’t mean it as an accusation and Sen’s slow smile showed he knew it.

  “And where Captain Caru polishes that silver blade to a mirror sheen and Creyath stokes his fire, what will you do before the morrow?”

  The way he asked it was leading. Iyana quirked a brow at him.

  “They mean to strike for the Midnight Dunes,” he said. “But you and I both know who the real enemy is. The old man should. I wonder why he won’t make for them. We’ve all heard the songs. We all know who drives the Bloody Screamers and the Pale Men alike.” She made as if to speak but had no answer, unsure what he was driving at. “You can find them, Iyana. The Witches of the Sands. The Blood Seers. You may not think it, but deep down, we both know you’re stronger than me in all the ways that count. You can hold where I can only break, and I was a fool for thinking otherwise. The tethers, shrouds—whatever you want to call them—they break in my grasp. You can find them and I—”

  “Can slay them?” she asked, her voice taking on an edge. Sen’s eyes glinted dangerously, then settled.

  “Or you can hold them,” he said. “Stop them from whatever it is they’re planning.”

  “What do you fear that is?” she asked, unable to keep the suspicion from showing. She was quickly remembering the strange man who had been so alluring to the south, where the Valley had spilled them out into the black plains before Center. And then, how that one had slipped away in short order, revealing something twisted. Something bitter as the dry and sour plants of the desert they found themselves in.

  “You see the way the old man speaks,” Sen said. He shook his head in exasperation and Iyana tried to drop the tension from her shoulders. It seemed to calm him. “He knows this is nothing but a fool’s quest, making for the Dunes and what he’s kept there with those songs seeping out of the crows’ mouths.”

  Iyana thought of Rusul and her sisters. The comparison was unintentional, but no less apt because of it. Pevah had said the Blood Seers kept to the old ways that the Crows of Eastlake claimed to. Had their forebears never left with the King of Ember and his great caravan a century ago, perhaps they would now be among them—bitter things sowing nothing but pain with their fermented hate.

  “We have to trust in them,” Iyana said. “The folk we’re among, and the one who leads them.” She hesitated and he nearly seized on it, but something in her face or tone stayed him. “We are too few.”

  “If what he says is true,” Sen said, though his voice had dropped much of its vigor, “about what he harbors beneath those mountains of earth, an army wouldn’t be enough.”

  “No,” Iyana said. She said it with a smile. “An army of men and women, perhaps—and maybe even the Landkist among us, ourselves included. But we have a Sage, and the very same who trapped him. What sort of a hunter traps something he can’t later kill?”

  “The kind who knows his limits,” Sen said, steady. Iyana shrugged it off and sighed. Sen opened his mouth to speak and then closed it.

  “You should take rest, Sen,” she said, meeting his eyes. He frowned at first and then softened at the real concern he saw there. “I mean it.”

  “What will you do?” he asked.

  “Walk,” she said. “Think. Walk and think, and in tunnels unburdened by the smell. I’ve nothing to polish or sharpen, and sleep won’t find me willing. Not now.” She turned toward the doorway and heard Sen slide back down against the far wall.

  In truth, the smell wasn’t so bad out in the hall. The scent of ozone and ash that seemed to seep into the airy caverns from the bedrock was doing its work, and the blistered hands among the desert dwellers and those of the Valley whose blades were ready had cleared away everything but the memory of gore.

  Still, it was all too close for her liking. It seemed few among them were willing to climb the stairs or make for the surface and sun, the combination of the heat of the day and the fear of not being present for another assault infecting them all. She passed those who sat or rested in their alcoves and against their pillars, those who moved from task to task looking to make their bodies as busy as their frantic minds. But it was the parents and the children who trailed them, silent or chattering, crying or laughing, that took her heart and alternated between warming it and breaking it.

  They were being dressed for travel, she saw, their threadbare clothes being replaced with thicker stuff made for wear. When Iyana and the others returned from the west—if they returned—they would find this place empty. She supposed it made sense. Now that their hideout was known by the enemy, it was no longer safe to linger. And judging by the swiftness with which the nomads bent to the task of preparing to leave, she could see that they had named them aptly. This was no more a home to them than it was to Iyana and the Valleyfolk. The desert was their home as the ocean was to the beasts that dwelled there, its boundaries vast and unchecked.

  She passed Talmir as he spoke with Jes, the two going over the best formation for the march while Mial and Creyath watched them. She passed by Ket and looked away from him hurriedly as he smiled. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, just that she wanted to pass what time she had left before whatever was to come in solitude—or as close to it as she could find.

  The sloped black shore of the lake, normally full of the sounds of splashing between the lapping, of laughter between the chatter of the nesting birds above, was now mournfully quiet. She thought of going up and felt a cool tickle on the bare skin of her arms, her sleeved rolled high and crusted with the flowing grains of the sands above and the damp of the places below.

  As she approached the shoreline, its distant pillar dimmed in the daylight in a way she still found strange, she felt a stab of panic. What if the Pale Men waited in the shadows along the banks and eddies? What if the painted men hung in shadowed alcoves, waiting for another chance to strike?

  She shook the thoughts and left her shoes behind, stepping into the water that was warmer than the air above, but no less refreshing because of it. She skirted the eastern edge of the cavern, sinking up to her knees and stepping carefully over the smoothed shelves as the tide receded inch by grudging inch. Her thoughts did not race. She had always been good at calming them, like Linn and unlike Kole. She dipped into a break in the black glass wall and only recognized it as a familiar way when she was well onto the path.

  Rounded mounds of dried stone were wetted with her passing and shallow pools greeted her at steady intervals. The filtered light of the late afternoon was the color of yellow-white dust, and it came in through bands and shimmering tongues to light her way. When she climbed a mound that was higher up than the rest, she recognized it as the place she had followed the children a day or two before—time was lost in this place as often as Pevah found it and turned it into something to be used.

  Iyana paused there and let loose a sigh she feared might break her. She was away from the others, nothing but the suggestions of their distant voices drowned out by the angled veins of the world below the desert. Even the sounds of striking and hammering didn’t reach her here, and no birds nested this far in—this far from the skies.

  The bend was rounded up ahead, and it was dark. Iyana took a steadying breath and slid down the opposite side of the smooth rise on her backside. She took the bend with some speed, forging through her hesitance until she left that behind as well. She followed the light her eyes gave off and the walls reflected like the eyes of some primordial that slithered behind them and slipped beneath the sloping floor.

  She was at first surprised by the presence, but she did not feel afraid, and she felt the smile that spread across her face before she had given thought to grow it. She dipped into the sight of the Between, though she knew she would not see the black and red tendrils she had the time before. The wa
y was bare, but it thrummed fainter than the beating heart of an infant—fainter than moth’s wings over the water.

  The light of the pillar was behind her now, so she navigated by feel, and soon her hand lost purchase as the close tunnel gave way to an open room whose sides fell away like the buried urn of some long-ago god; perhaps the Mother, whom she did not know and might not believe in, though she had seen one of her many hearts and marveled at it as she never had an Ember.

  “Hello, there,” she said, stepping down onto a floor that had been leached of its damp.

  She stood before the Everwood tree, and now that she was alone, she knew with certainty that she was not. Not fully. Before, she had given it up as some effect of the Sage and his strange power. Now, she knew it had been the work of the tree itself. It was not sentience she sensed, nor even emotion. She swayed on the edges of the Between, and in so doing, she should have felt intent or its cousin emotions radiating, reaching and attempting to grasp, to be felt and perhaps understood.

  “How old are you, I wonder?” she asked, the question coming somewhat unbidden to her mind as she stepped over its roots that were like snakes frozen in time. Where before she had felt some small trepidation, now there was only awe. Now, it was not intent she felt. Not emotion.

  It was awareness, however small and however subtle. It was not a fleeting thing like a sting at the end of a needle or the bite in a frosty wind. This was a slow thing, considered and enveloping. Iyana could not have ignored it even had she the will to, and while it did not bend or sway any which way, she felt warm in its presence like she hadn’t before in the brooding presence of the old man—or wizard—who had knelt here.