The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  Something caught his eye—a flash of moon and ghostly white, like a slow river of milk wending its way across that barren expanse. Karin had paused ahead, so Talmir chanced a closer look.

  He squinted against the lavender sky that stole over the stars. He saw the great mounds of earth made into shapes like spikes on armor to the south, their tips glowing molten to bend all good sense. Black specks at the top could have been flies or men locked in mortal conflict, but it was the sight below that took the heart from him.

  “Ceth was right.”

  “What is it?” Karin asked, coming over to stand beside him. Talmir only pointed, not trying to still the quiver that infected his voice and made its quick and aching way down into his hand.

  Looking closer, the river resolved into the myriad shapes of men, or things that might once have been them. The Pale Men staggered and lurched, their sightless eyes pointed unerring as their path toward the Midnight Dunes—toward Iyana, Creyath and the clutch of warriors left among their company. There were hundreds, and though they did not walk in rows abreast or time their steps with one another, the bloody song that drifted over all seemed bent in their direction, lashing like the whips of close-by masters growing farther. It spurred them on and caused their heads to tilt and their shoulders to jerk. Talmir could almost see strings streaming behind, clutched in the dark embrace of some god who’d made them.

  “Too many,” Talmir said, nearly breathless.

  “Means less where we’re going.”

  Talmir turned to regard Karin, but the First Runner had already moved off, his boots leaving little more than the hint of tracks as he glided over the next rise. Talmir tossed a last look at the portent the west had become and moved to follow, leaving the soft ridge behind as they crossed into the north, the jagged red spurs of Ceth’s hostile-seeming land looming ahead like unwashed teeth. Teeth that recalled the painted tribesmen and the sharp bones they carried.

  Much of the lands behind had been bare. The black shelves had been left to the east and the leaning gray slabs far beyond them. Now, Talmir could see smaller versions of the same looming like pockets—caves and arches rising like fins from the desert’s skin, entryways into the warm veins of the Mother below.

  The song grew louder—deeper—the farther they went, and Talmir found himself panting with a fatigue that had nothing to do with the pace Karin set. He shook his head and tried to maintain as straight a path as possible while Karin did anything but. The First Runner gritted his teeth and pulled his cheeks in, but did not slow, and Talmir marveled at him. It was as if the song and all it held did nothing but present him a new obstacle to climb—a new challenge to rise beyond—and Talmir saw something of the son in the father, and knew Kole Reyna as the son of Karin where before he and the rest could only see him as the legacy of Sarise A’zu.

  Just when Talmir meant to raise his voice and call for a halt, and just after he fell to his knees and felt them sink into the yielding sands, another song rose to supplant the first—or at least to challenge it. Talmir’s head swam, but he knew before it came clear that this was a song he knew.

  He felt hands grip him and shook his head clear as he rose, his vision swimming as he took in Karin’s concerned expression. The First Runner took hold of Talmir’s shirt and ripped, tearing free a small strip that he split again. He rolled each into an approximation of a ball and pointed to his ear, turning so that Talmir could see the stuff that filled his own.

  Talmir nodded, swaying unsteadily, and moved to mimic him. He took a step forward and felt more than heard the muffled sound of his boots parting the soft gravel beneath him, but already he felt more clear.

  “It seems I’m not cut out for this,” Talmir said, tilting his chin from side to side to get the cloth to settle.

  Karin smirked. “I’ve brought you along for what comes next.” His eyes drifted down to the sword the hung from Talmir’s belt.

  “The song,” Talmir said, trying to keep his voice low though he wanted to shout. “Is it …”

  “Our red friends,” Karin said. He pointed to the northeast, and Talmir squinted. There, sitting atop a modest mound, was one of Pevah’s desert foxes. The animal planted its feet and threw its head back to unleash another howl that sounded more wolf-like than the yips and cackles the creatures usually put out. And as it did, more rose to bolster the claim.

  As the foxes howled atop their hillocks, Talmir felt a break in the bloody song of the Seers. Then the dark drone redoubled, and this time it came close to throwing Karin from his feet as well, but the foxes were not cowed. They sang like men and women, like things fighting a battle men could never hope to understand, and Talmir marveled and felt a kinship with the beasts that might hint as to their place with the tribes he and his had left behind so many years ago.

  “They would make for good wall hounds,” Karin said, watching the scene play out. The fox quit its complaints and loped down the dune, heading north, and the others gave up their voices as well, advancing as the dark song bent and twisted, seeking new roads to the south and west.

  “Aye,” Talmir agreed. “But I’m not sure beasts like these are made for lands that don’t slide as often as shift. As Pevah said, they’ve been here a long time. By the looks of things, they’ll be here a long time after we’re gone.”

  Karin nodded. “We’ll just have to give as good an account of ourselves as we can while we’re here,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll make it into the songs these sing to their pups—songs that’ll greet the dunes and roll down to the borders of the Valley for generations to come.”

  As quickly as the words left his lips Karin turned back into the shadow he had been, his features shifting, will bending back to the task at hand.

  “We’re close,” he said, and Talmir felt his own hand reaching absently for the hilt at his belt.

  “Tell me what you need of me,” Talmir said.

  “You’ll know.”

  Talmir kept his distance as Karin bent back to the task at hand. It wasn’t hard. The First Runner showed his earlier pace to be a lazy form of the one he adopted now. He raced over the dunes and slid down the opposite banks. He ran around the bases as often as he arrowed over the tops, sometimes following the tracks the foxes left and other times making his own that Talmir filled and made deeper with his passing.

  There was a short bark that turned into a snarl. Talmir scrambled over the next rise and saw the body Karin had left behind. The painted warrior was broad-chested, his life-blood pumping in spurts from a neck freshly slashed. He had deep gouges in his bare shin, and Talmir looked up to see one of the foxes shadowing Karin as the First Runner crept around the base of the next dune.

  Talmir pulled his blade free while Karin crouched and the fox and its fellows slinked with their bellies to the sand. Together, they made a third song to fill the air in the north. It was a song that Karin wrote as Talmir struck the chords with his father’s sword.

  They were in the thick of things, now, and Talmir allowed himself to become a hunter like Karin and the beasts they followed. They made the dunes their hunting grounds; used the shadows they sent as hiding places, the dips and crevices as traps they sprung on those who laid in wait for them. They killed a dozen, slashing throats and spearing spines, and all but one died without making a sound.

  The foxes started the panic, causing the scouts and posted guards to whirl and spin before Karin sprang with that black hunter’s blade or Talmir leapt with his crescent of silver. Not a one freed a sharpened bone or blade in time to counter. Not a one tested the poise of the First Runner nor the skill of the best sword in the south.

  Talmir left all modicum of modesty behind as he bent to the killing, never hesitating over the dying. His was one of the few metal blades to strike fear into the hearts of the Rivermen—first in the hand of his father and then in his. It was not a thing to be proud of, but those had been different times, and each found a reason to give his blade a home in the heart of another. That was a true war, one against me
n and between them. One fought for honor as much as need, the former of which was difficult to find.

  In a way, Talmir knew they had been lucky with the emergence of the Dark Kind: a common enemy to sow common goals and lasting alliances. Still, there was something missing in the way the shadows fell. Some lack of impact or truth as demons withered and died on the ends of swords or Everwood blades. Talmir had never thought himself a good man, but enough time had passed and enough others had worked at it long enough to convince him he was something close.

  Tonight, he left it all behind, and he thought the man and beasts around him did as well. They made music together that the witches in their shallow caves couldn’t match, at least for the moment—that the painted warriors and the crouching savages could not stay and could not hear before it was too late. The red teeth broke apart in mouths that ran redder, and the tribesmen of the sands died in ways that made them appear achingly, disappointingly human, washing away whatever fear they might have called up before.

  Talmir’s new armor was the sweat the desert coated him in. His blade was red but not crusted. It was too warm and the winds had died away, leaving them and their killing to fill the eternal dusk. It felt like a story, and they the figures dancing across the page, leaving their inky prints for the judgment of those who would come later and see the places where the sand stuck together, where the yellow turned to something deeper.

  Karin made a sound low in his throat that even the foxes seemed to heed, and the pack gathered around and crawled on their bellies up the south-facing side of a great rise that must have been the last.

  At the top, Karin lay with his side pressed into the dune like the homes in the Red Bowl of Hearth. He pointed and Talmir nodded back, extending his neck inch by aching inch until the top of his face broke the plane.

  All had gone silent and all was still. Even the foxes looked from one to another as often as at the men, waiting for some call to action or else unsure of what to do next.

  The north side of the dune fell away like a spill, and at the bottom, close enough to hurl a stone at, rested a cave. Alone for leagues around, it was a black thing whose mouth appeared blacker, its half-buried shelf little more than a ledge that stood above the sands at the height of a man. The land around it seemed sunken, as if the rock bore such a weight that it had fallen and pulled the dunes down with it.

  To the west was a jagged trail. The Pale Men had come from here, let loose from some deep bowel within the desert dark and released into the world of men.

  “It’s quiet,” Talmir said. He watched Karin. The First Runner peered into the cave as if he could see the souls within, his brown eyes lighting with a fire Talmir had never noticed before. He wondered for the first time whether Kole really had got his gifts from the World, or from the mother that had received them first.

  He had seen how Karin had earned his title. How the title was as much a part of him as a shield he carried. The other Runners of the Valley were nothing close. Glorified messengers. Talmir saw for the first time how the bright, bold Sarise A’zu would be drawn to this man, who stood as a Sentinel opposite to those the World Apart sent—one who guarded his own from them. One as deadly. One more true.

  One of the foxes voiced a complaint, and Talmir thought he saw shadows moving within the opening. The air around them began to shimmer. Talmir’s skin went cold and then hot, alternating between the two with an unnatural quickness that started and stopped him sweating and quickened his heart. His blade scraped as it slid across the loose sand. The foxes’ ears twitched, and Karin stayed him with a sound that wasn’t far from those their red companions produced.

  As the air swam like a curtain of clear water, Talmir’s temples began to buzz with the beginnings of that dark song. He checked the cloth in his ears and found it, but still the haunting melody took him. He saw Karin grit his teeth and heard the foxes betray their presence all along the slope as they voiced their counters. But they were discordant, now, as tired from the killing as whatever waited within the cave was solid, together. Ready.

  Talmir thought he had been drawn into some vision, some other place, but somehow he knew it as a shadow of the past made suddenly clear. He saw smudges and blurred images resolve into the shapes of men and leaping streaks of orange into the forms of the very beasts that stood with them now, only these were much older.

  This was the cave of the First Keeper, Talmir knew, and these imagined scenes were some long-ago fight. Black figures came for them that recalled the Dark Kind and the Sentinels they had faced in the south, red eyes leering and piercing the desert night. And the men and foxes stood and fought with tooth, claw and singing bows to throw them back. There was a light that began as nothing more than the hint of a cinder, burning like a single eye in the center of the cave.

  Talmir stood and Karin stood with him, though he lurched as if his own body betrayed him, exposed him. The foxes raised their voices into a keening crescendo as the witches’ song took them and showed them the bright core they gathered around. It was a light that wasn’t here. Not really. But it had been.

  They saw the images of the men and women fall beneath the onslaught the night sent after them, the desert foxes torn apart by wolves with barbed tongues and dripping, poisoned teeth. The Dark Kind poured and scrambled over the ledge of slate, and a lone figure stood before a fire growing brighter with each halting breath.

  In the swimming image, the figure threw the Dark Kind back with a sudden brightness that recalled the sun in hateful glory. He burned them all away as robed figures huddled and chanted behind him.

  The brightness broke the space from past to present, shattering it all like glass, and Talmir felt his knees go weak. He felt a steadying hand on his shoulder as Karin panted beside him. There was a burning at his ankle, and he looked down to see the sand dyed red around him, his blood dripping from the open maw of one of the foxes they now counted as friends, its yellow eyes staring up at him, expectant.

  Karin sported a similar wound, and when the two looked back down into the pit and its black cave, the song no longer warped the air around it. There was a light, but it was nothing more than a crackling fire guarded by old and jealous things, figures hidden in shadow whose voices curdled the blood.

  And before the lip of the ledge, coming closer on crouched legs and muscled haunches, were painted men and women, all red and blue and glowing green. They ceased their creeping upon being seen. They clutched bones stained brown with old blood or nocked iron-tipped arrows to spindly strings made of sinew.

  The foxes hit them with a rage Talmir would not have imagined possible, and he and Karin slid, tumbled and raced toward the bottom, intent on adding their teeth to the mix now that the spell had been broken.

  Even as she rode the momentum down the slope Pevah had made through some strange and fortuitous magic, Iyana felt a tug from the north. It felt like a hook dragging at her skin by the ear. It felt like a child mewling for its mother, though Iyana had yet to be blessed as such. She knew it as the consequence of whatever violence Talmir and Karin had found themselves in.

  It seemed she was becoming more aware by the day, and yet less sure. Now, she did not have to fall into a trance or inhale lavender smoke and breathe strange powders to greet and be greeted by the Between. Here, in this place and time, it seemed that other realm was never far from her.

  In addition to that tug, she heard what the others heard, felt it as none of them could—aside from Sen and likely Pevah—as the witches’ song wafted over the expanse like a swarm of biting, buzzing things that moved as one body. Nothing good could come of such a melody. It was old and stuffy, rotten to the core.

  But there was something else within it. Something that had her smiling despite the circumstances, and despite the war her heart waged with the bone wall of her chest. Despite the sweat that poured from her brow and coated her neck, though her throat had gone dry enough to threaten cracking. It was a note of panic, and she thought for a moment how she might feel if two of
the Valley’s deadliest came for her and hers as they huddled and chanted around their fiery pit, their entrails and old bones and pots of paint and marrow. The First Runner and the Bronze Star. Heroes’ names, and belonging to those who counted themselves as the furthest thing.

  The last cliff of sand turned loose and spilled, and they followed it down to the basin that was more a wasteland. The soldiers of the caravan and the red- and gray-sashed warriors of the desert ranged before and around her, and Iyana could see their tethers flickering out of the corners of her eyes—their hues as varied as the faces that made them up. More varied than the piercing eyes and the dull, and even more different than the many blades and sharp edges the twin companies carried to do their hero’s work.

  She gasped as an intense heat washed over her left shoulder, and she turned to see Creyath holding up his hand in apology.

  “Trouble in the north?” he asked as she rubbed at the spot he’d grabbed.

  “Of course,” she said. She looked back that way, peering into the distance. The great plateau of sand—whiter here in the basin—came up against more crusted ridges in the north. They were higher there than those they had come down from, the ridges carving a crescent path to the north and west. The sky was more blue and black there and with brighter stars than the strange amber and purple glow that hung over them now.

  “But that’s why we’re here, is it not?” she asked, brushing past him as she sought out Pevah. “Just about finding the right sort of trouble from here on out.”

  “Well said,” Creyath laughed, keeping stride.

  In truth, Iyana was nervous enough to feel sick. She had seen violence—had seen it very recently, when the same horrors that spread out before them had invaded the caverns beneath the sands. But she had rarely been a part of it.