Karin blinked and wiped at his eyes with a sleeve already soaked with the stuff. He saw the tumult through a more apt lens, red and blurred, and moved toward the brightest piece as Talmir brought down another that came for him. Karin tripped over the legs of one and fell atop a still clutch of matted red fur—one of the dead on their side—before regaining his footing.
He grabbed at another softness and heard a screech that warmed his heart for the rage that filled him. He hadn’t felt its like in a long time. He pulled back and brought some of the scalp loose, and tried not to focus on the whites of her eyes as he brought the sharp bone across her windpipe, turning the scream to a gurgle. He cast her aside and helped Talmir bring down the last.
When it was done, Karin fell to his knees and plunged his hands into the loose sand, coating his fingers in the dry powder between the grains. He used it to scrape the blood away from the rims of his eyes and growled at the sting of it, and when he looked up he saw Talmir a bit clearer than he had before. The captain cast about, wild, his light hair matted with blood that had already crusted. He sported a cut below one eye and the other side of his face was purpled and bruised, but otherwise he looked none the worse for wear.
“Dead,” Talmir said, the word seeming to jar something loose in him. He shook his head and let the red tip of his blade sink into the sand at his feet with a dull scrape.
“Don’t listen,” Karin said, his own voice coming out hoarse and unrecognizable. He stood on wavering legs and braced himself against the obsidian shelf beside them. The slope was littered with the dead—warriors whose skill could not match their gusto, and Karin felt a pang as much for them as for the errant desert foxes that lay still among their number. As for the rest of the pack, they gathered around the two men from the Valley, panting and expectant.
Karin allowed Talmir to pull him up to more even footing, and the two turned toward the open mouth of the cave. Somehow, it seemed even darker than it had before, the song—now more a wailing moan or a sick wind—casting the whole of it in a strange haze, like dreaming.
Come.
Karin turned to Talmir, giving him a questioning look that the captain returned.
“What?” Talmir asked.
Karin quirked a brow, his heartbeat slowing but his head still pounding despite the end of the sudden bout of violence.
“Did you hear—”
“The Seers.” Talmir nodded toward the ledge. He shook his head as if trying to clear the haze of sleep or wine and Karin turned back. The foxes had dispersed along the slope, some creeping toward the higher path, tensing and loosening as they looked toward the mouth of the cave as if they intended to leap. They complained in shrill voices while some took up the song Karin had found haunting enough in its own way not long ago. Now, it sounded beautiful—natural like nothing coming from the crooked, musty mouths of dark witches could be. Somehow, their collective desert song seemed to cut through the dark one wafting above them like a rotted stream.
“We need to stop that racket,” Talmir said and Karin only nodded. It sounded simple enough, but as he shared a cautious glance with the captain he knew Talmir felt the same sense of unease as him. They had slain the men and women who had stayed behind and now the witches sat unguarded around their sloped black pit. But Karin had learned long ago to trust his gut, and right now it was twisted into knots beyond counting.
Karin looked toward the south and tugged on Talmir’s formerly white sleeve to turn him in the same direction. The captain’s silence was as telling as Karin’s.
Where before the sky had been filled with a purple-amber glow that could have been beautiful if it wasn’t so wrong, now it moved with a pulsing version of the same. Streaks blinked across it that could have been lightning strikes, only there were no clouds to make them and no moisture for leagues around. Instead, they appeared as veins filled with anything but blood, and the stars that encircled the south seemed dim toward the center, toward the roiling expanse above the Midnight Dunes.
The song that slipped down like a swarm of dead snakes into that flat and endless canyon had no rhythm that Karin could pick out. And yet, looking at the way the sky moved, the dark and pockmarked canvas seeming to stretch and bow in on itself in a way that made his head swim, Karin thought the sky had found what pattern he could not and had been infected with it.
When he turned back to the black ledge and the chasm that hung above it, Karin felt an anger he couldn’t quite place. He thought of the Valley and of the Dark Kind that had long filled it. He thought of the Sage who had sent them and the one who had been set to guard them from the same. He thought of the countless dead he had seen made before their time and tried not to think of those he had added to the mix tonight—men and women whose only crime was to be born under the lordship of those who nurtured hate and bitterness in the place of love and loyalty.
Whatever the Sages might have done and whatever cosmic wrongs had yet to be righted—perhaps never could be righted—these desert witches had done more harm to these lands than any other. They deserved worse than whatever fate might befall them at the end of Karin’s anger or Talmir’s blade. Judging by the look the captain wore as his light eyes plied those same depths, Karin thought they were of one mind.
“Good thing we’re used to working in the dark,” Karin said and Talmir’s lips twitched in what could have been a smirk. The captain wiped the caked mix of sand and gummed blood on his trousers and reached up with one hand, pulling himself up and over the ledge with little difficulty and with no attempt to hide himself from whatever waited inside. He reached back and helped to haul Karin up while the foxes abandoned their pacing and feinted leaps and contented themselves with bearing witness as they belted their melody into the ruined sky.
Karin came to his feet and peered into the inky black, seeing little more than the faint suggestion of poised figures ringing the center. The moon and stars were brighter in the north than they were above the Midnight Dunes, but those pale lights did not dare break the dark curtain of the jagged cave mouth before them. There was a heat and a crackle that suggested fire, but if one burned it gave off no light and no promise of safety. Even the flames Karin imagined looked more like swaying serpents that hung above the pit the witches minded.
The song did not cease, but it dimmed some, fading into the background and setting itself in the reaches like a memory struggling to rise. A new voice rose to supplant it. It sounded like a dozen joined in unison, and it made Karin’s blood go cold and made Talmir’s lighter skin seem as pale as Iyana’s.
“This cave is a special place,” the voice or voices said, and Karin had to work to suppress a shudder. He felt like retching but held himself from it. He saw Talmir swallow as the captain took a step toward the darker patch that hung before them like smoke absent wind. “Do you know why?”
“Don’t know,” Talmir said. “Don’t much care.”
“But you should.”
The voice held some of the bitterness Karin might have expected, but more control—more calm—than he would have liked to hear, given the circumstances. He felt the urge to turn and look out over the sands dyed red with the dead they had made, but resisted. There were few wolves in the Valley, but there were enough things with teeth and the minds to use them. Karin had learned the same as any hunter never to take his eyes from something cornered.
“He came to wash away the dark,” the voice said as Talmir broke the plane and froze there, silver sword held out before him like a ward. “He came to smite the shadows and cast judgment on them in the form of his flames.”
Karin stepped away from Talmir, keeping his eyes wide and locked on the unmoving shadows farther in. He spoke as much to keep them occupied as to keep from focusing on the buzzing song that still hung above this new voice, or below it. The song that ran like a bloody river down to the south, where it compelled the Pale Men to acts not of their own volition, and whose ending might mean the end of more.
“The First Keeper knew this place,”
the voices said. “This is the site of your greatest tale, and the one you left behind when you took your fire into the south.”
Karin tried not to focus on the words, but the implications hit him harder than he could have thought possible. He saw the cave with new eyes, the black crags with new interest. He saw a blinding light wash the interior, imagined pictures from the stories of the desert days playing themselves out as if happening before him now.
The First Keeper. Could this have been the place where he had fallen to rise again? Could that have been the pit where he had been blessed with the Mother’s fire?
“We took nothing,” Talmir said, apparently better than Karin at keeping the words from doing their work, though his face was pained as if he warred with the same vision.
“Ah, but you did. The fire was not yours to take.”
Something streaked before Karin as he broke the shadowed plane. He lanced out with the bone blade and then froze as the shadowed figures turned their heads toward him like a clutch of serpents readying to strike.
“It was a gift,” Talmir said, edging forward. If he had seen the same streaking figure as Karin, he made no sign to show it. “Nothing taken that wasn’t given freely.”
A hiss melded with the song Karin could almost see now that they were in the inky black. He took another step forward and felt a rushing. He tensed but did not strike out this time, and no shadow came for him. The figures swayed almost too subtly to see, and Karin did not see a single mouth moving that would explain the eerie music they made.
“Was not given,” the voices said, raised in ire and in threat. “A thing taken. A thing misunderstood. A thing meant for making has been turned. A thing of light changed for dark purpose.”
Karin nearly laughed. Talmir did, a short, harsh bark that fit the song nicely.
“You would take up the cause of the Dark Kind as your own?” Karin asked, hating his curiosity and the sickening feeling it dredged up. “You would ally with the World Apart? Is that where you got whatever it is that coils before you? Is that where your song comes from, if you can call it such?”
The walls of the cavern began to carve themselves from his periphery. They were black with purple veins that threatened red in places, smooth and weathered from untold centuries facing the southeasterly wind. There was an age to the place that had nothing to do with the present company, a feeling of depth that went farther than anything Karin had felt in the caverns they had left to the east. He peered into that deeper darkness and imagined it as the throat of some long-dead drake—a king whose weak spawn had devolved into the bile-spitting lizards they had faced before.
Not unlike the crones before him.
He could see them now, or at least their forms. They ringed a pit that put out the opposite of light. Something swirled in their midst that burned without illuminating. Black fire. It had a familiar stink to it, like the Embers’ ozone mixed with dead things left in the rain. The figures had ceased their swaying. Their attention was fixed, seemingly on him, and he swallowed with a throat gone dry despite the stickiness of the chamber.
“We have taken,” the voices said, a surprising acknowledgement. “We have taken much, but we will give back to the World once we have preserved it.”
“Preserved,” Karin tasted the word, edging in so that his back brushed against the porous, sweating stone. “Not saved.”
“What is in a word?” If things like these had it left in them to laugh, Karin thought they might. He was closer now, but could not make out a single face around the black mass, nor could he distinguish a single voice from the buzzing of the song and attach it to a form.
To his right, Talmir had paused. The captain held his blade horizontal, as if he expected to bring it up in a block before a strike. His eyes were everywhere but on the kneeling figures before them, and Karin wondered if he had seen the shadow or felt its passing.
“And what have you taken?” Karin asked, edging closer. He felt like a hunter cornering a pack of wolves in their own den. He felt foolish, and feeling it made that anger rise just below the surface where it bubbled and spat, aching to be let out. He glanced at Talmir and saw his brow working in the lavender light that leaked in from the desert sky and the blood-soaked dunes that observed them dispassionately.
“Listen,” the voices said, dragging it out like a snake might. “Listen close.” Karin would rather do anything but. Still, he couldn’t help it entirely.
The song drifted over them, the walls of the cavern thrumming with it, bleeding with it. Now that he heard it, he realized why it sounded so different from the crones sitting before him, from the vipers in their dusky pit. The voices in the song were not the same, but he thought he’d heard them before. If not, he thought he’d seen the ones they belonged to. An image flashed of the Pale Men painting a light desert lighter still, like morning frost. His heart rang against his chest and his ears pounded with the blood it sent racing. He stopped dead.
Now, they did laugh, and Karin knew that they had a piece of his thoughts, knew they had played a hand in guiding them.
Karin settled into a crouch. He was close enough to spring, now, and springing was on his mind. He bared his teeth like a hunting cat. Nearly hissed like one.
“What have you taken?” he asked again, growling it out through his teeth.
“They were our children,” they said. “The children of ours. Their hearts were ours to take. Their souls.”
Karin saw the images play out before his eyes. He saw babes torn from their mothers’ grasps in the years immediately following Ninyeva’s Valley migration, or else given freely by the red-toothed savages this tribe had become in later years. These witches had taken everything from their own, propping up the strong with paint and black magic and using the same to take what mattered most from those poor children who would never know anything of love or want or fullness.
They were empty husks, and now Karin knew that they were not burned or scarred from tortures or design. They were things made by their unmaking. They were the bodies left behind once the jackals of the desert got a hold. They had never known anything but, and now they followed their own stolen voices—their souls, as the Seers said—across the leagues and cold, wind-blown miles, seeking to find solace and a place to put their rage, something to fill the great empty that was so much wider and deeper than the place.
Talmir straightened. He was close to them. Closer than Karin by a stride. His face seemed blank and Karin guessed he had been shown the same. His silver blade hung at his side, but not limp or lazy. It was the still tail of a scorpion, and the witches frozen voles in his sights.
“You have done this,” Talmir said, his voice low and level, eerily calm. “You have taken everything from those poor souls, and done it using the power of the World Apart because your Mother left you cold and without fire? You have done this because you want the fire back, and you think it lies beneath the Midnight Dunes?”
No answer. Not immediately, but a feeling of amusement and of calculation. Even anticipation.
“What tall tales the Sage has told you.”
“You would lecture us,” Karin said, “when you serve one among their number? The Eastern Dark. Say it. Say you are his dark servants. His Dark Kind.”
Karin had found the drifting shadow. Some part of him feared it to be a Sentinel. After all, the smell was the same as that which filled the Valley in the Dark Months, he now remembered. It was a close thing to the stench that had hung over the fields of Hearth for weeks after, that would fill the rivers of the Fork for seasons hence.
But this shadow drew breath. It was still, but not completely so, and it wore a wrap to cover its eyes or kept them closed; he could see only the beady reds and bloody browns of the Seers across the nest from which the dark song sprouted.
“Do not let the name he has been given—”
“Earned,” Karin said, edging closer still while keeping his attention firmly fixed on the unmoving shadow. “It is a name earned.”
&
nbsp; “The Landkist are a scourge,” the voices said. “An abomination. Unnatural as anything you see before you. More so. They are a reaction to things gone wrong. Not a gift. An infection.”
“One caused by the Sages’ folly,” Karin said.
“Yes,” the voices said in unison. Now that he was closer, they had spread some, and no longer sounded incorporeal or separate. “Yes. The Red Waste is one of them. They broke the World. He is not your ally. They are the enemy. And now, one seeks to make things right. One seeks to break the chain and stop the World Apart closing in.”
“Your master,” Karin said.
“We do not serve him,” they said. “We do not serve the Eastern Dark, though we have known him in times when he was more sure and less … frightened. Less craven.”
“And what do you seek to do?” Talmir asked, his voice oddly dispassionate. Karin eyed him from his periphery. The captain stood as a statue, but his grip had changed slightly. “You said he seeks to stop the World Apart. If you don’t serve him, what do you seek?”
“Nothing of the sort.” One head turned toward Talmir and then settled back on Karin. “We have learned from that dark one enough to trouble his brother, or so he thinks. We will kill the Red Waste and rid our lands of him and his. But we will not join with the Eastern Dark to halt the World Apart from coming. We will bring it here. We have seen its gifts. We know its power. We know the music it makes, and where it leads.”
There was a great sighing like ecstasy and a foul-smelling breeze that went with it. “It was foolish to beckon the World Apart,” the voices said. “It would be less wise to shun it now that it is so close. Close enough to taste.” The bloody eyes seemed to see through Karin. “We know what lies beneath the Midnight Dunes, no matter what those poor fools think. No matter what our painted heroes or the Sage and his followers believe. We have heard his voice, and it is the sweetest music, for it is not his own. He speaks with the voices of the many in that other place. For he is a Lord of the Night. He is power and dread incarnate.”
The Midnight Dunes Page 41