The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  She supposed it made sense. After all, Ceth’s were a people who had fought the Twins of Whiteash, the Sages widely considered to be cruelest of the lot even if they weren’t as mighty as some. As for the red-sashes, Iyana felt a kinship with them now that she could only reach at before. Something about the setting and the shared horror of it all. Something about the beast that beat upon its bindings from below called them back to a time when they weren’t separate—back to a time when they shared an Ember King and not simply a memory of him.

  The thought of T’Alon Rane had her mind tracing familiar pathways to unfamiliar lands. She thought of Center and the Emerald Road and wondered whether Kole and Linn had found him. She thought of what they might be doing and the roads they might be traveling to keep from wishing for them to be here beside her.

  It didn’t help.

  And then there was another sound that filled Iyana with dread before it dispelled it. Not a sound, but rather a change in it. She looked up, forgetting for the moment that she had left her better sight behind in the Between. She thought to reach back in to that realm, but a warning look from Sen stayed her. He shook his head slowly, holding a hand toward her as if motioning her back. But he too turned his eyes skyward.

  The dark song had become such a part of the environment that its sudden disturbance was jarring. It changed from low and steady moaning like dead wind to a thin shriek that split the purple sky like cracks of thunder before falling to something less than what it had been—something less rhythmic and more discordant.

  “There.”

  She followed Sen’s pointing finger and tried to swallow past the rising bile as she saw the carnage along the lower slopes. All was still there because all was dead or dying, but farther up, the sight was stranger still. The Pale Men still stood in their scores, but where before they had set upon each other with a fury that put the Dark Kind to shame, now they simply stood, motionless, the stars casting what pale light they could through the lavender murk to light them.

  Their heads tilted sickly, sharply, like the heads of owls on strings. A cold wind rose, and even the stench it carried of the massacre could not undo the reprieve it brought in its wake as the last mournful, angry notes of the witches’ song evaporated.

  None spoke for a time, and as Iyana looked from the Pale Men standing like unlit candles down to the savage red warriors, she saw understanding dawn on those painted faces that began as fear before switching to fresh anger. They began to shout and motion, gesturing with their sharpened bones and obsidian blades. Some turned to the north, casting worried glances toward the place their dark mothers had hidden like the cravens they were.

  Toward the place where they had died.

  “They did it.” Iyana breathed it out in relief. She earned confused looks until the Valley soldiers followed her gaze.

  “Captain Caru,” one of the women beside Ket said.

  “And the First Runner,” Mial added, his voice awed.

  Iyana felt the smile touch her face and lost it a moment later as she swiveled toward Pevah. The old man’s face was contorted into something like a scowl but more pained. He too seemed to be listening, and she saw that he had shod his soles and dug his bare feet into the thin layer of white sand.

  Another rumble that sounded like a premonition. Iyana swallowed.

  “It doesn’t matter?” Ceth said, brows drawn together as he looked from Iyana to Pevah. “Slaying the Seers avails us nothing?”

  Pevah blinked as he noticed the sets of eyes turned his way. He offered a smile and a nod that seemed less than pitiful to Iyana.

  “A victory, to be sure,” he said. “The crones had to die, and truth be told I feared we’d never get it done.”

  “But …?” Iyana led.

  Pevah’s red eyes focused on her, and now she could see the black pits at the centers expanding, growing back into those dark pools she had seen before. She did not want to look at the rest of him to see if it would follow suit.

  “This is a fight that was always coming,” he said, nodding toward the north. “No matter what bones and entrails they cast. Having them dead is good. It will not save us. Not now.” He turned back toward the west. “Having them dead is good,” he said, nodding to himself.

  “Happy to help,” Ket said, his bitterness showing plain where the others kept themselves quiet or aloof.

  “I do not ask you to stay,” Pevah said, unwilling to meet Ket’s eyes.

  “You don’t ask us to leave, either,” Iyana said.

  “No,” he admitted. “No, I do not.” He glanced at Creyath, the Ember’s amber eyes a steady, burning smolder in the night. “I will be vulnerable when it starts,” he said.

  “When what starts?” Sen asked and Pevah didn’t answer, though Iyana felt the buzzing start up once more. Now his whole form seemed to blur with it, gathering about him like a shell or a shroud.

  Creyath and Ceth both exchanged looks that told her they would be staying no matter what. They all would, but it didn’t change the feeling of despair in the air—a feeling no absence of song could dispel completely. Not when a Sage—one of the great powers of the World—stood in the grip of fear and indecision before them.

  Not fear, Iyana knew. Knowing.

  There were shouts from the north.

  “There it is,” Pevah said, his voice seeming to come from a long way off. As Iyana watched in horrified fascination, the painted warriors began climbing the base of the Dunes. They stepped over the dismembered bodies of the poor wretches they had sent up, their blades lancing down to finish those who still twitched. When they reached the lowest of the still-standing Pale Men they dispatched them as well, their blades making deep cuts in the white necks and announcing their deaths with red ribbons that flashed in the Dunes’ amber glow.

  “Pevah?” Iyana said it with a warning tone. She reached out her consciousness and harnessed the tether that was never far—the green, thrumming thread that was as much her as she was it, and which she had never noticed in her years spent merging it with the dimming threads of others she had healed and nurtured. She flashed into the other Sight and picked out the threads of the painted warriors and thought about reaching out for them, ensnaring them. She had held a score or more of the Pale Men, but these were different. Where those tethers had been deep black with purple tendrils, these were brighter reds and oranges and bloody hues—threads with much life and wills bent on killing.

  “Leave them,” Pevah said. “They want to meet their Ember god.” He paused, and Iyana should not have been surprised to see his face break into a smile that was more a wolf’s toothy grin. “Let them.”

  Iyana felt a numbness steal over her as she watched the warriors do their work. Without the beckoning of the song, the Pale Men had been reduced to staring, listless children, alone and unloved—abandoned by the Mothers that had only ever used them for their blood and the power their suffering produced. She forgave them as they fell, but for the warriors who did the killing now with no dark songs and no lashing whips to drive them on, she felt a cold fire burning deep in her core. Even during the Dark Months she could not recall feeling it so clear and so intoxicatingly potent.

  It was hate, and it was a bitter thing to carry. She was loath to let it go.

  As the Pale Men fell and joined the mess they’d made of a place that could have seemed beautiful from a distance, the air grew quiet and the ground went still. The painted warriors looked to one another, expectant, exuberant, the presence of their enemies lost in the anticipation of an event that had come to define them—their charge, just as the men and women around Iyana held its opposite at heart.

  The ground quaked hard enough to rattle her teeth. Iyana stumbled and nearly went over. Others did, and one atop the Midnight Dunes was buried beneath a slide of heavy, packed and bloody sand.

  Now, shouts and screams mixed fear with rapture and the warriors ran and tumbled and slid down the cascades the beast below them made, eager to be free of its path and eager to see it rise
. They hit the bottom on the east-facing side and did not put as much distance between them as they should have. Iyana knew it even before the loose mountainside swept out to claim half a dozen, snapping bones and crushing sinew and drowning out whatever cries they sent up.

  Sand flew like hail. Iyana shielded her eyes as the dry storm struck her with a sting that ripped the skin from her elbows. She squinted through the dust and caught a glimpse of amber and black—a great, reaching hand, grasping and pulling—before another great gout of earth shot toward them like the tallest wave she had seen.

  Iyana was sure they would all die, but just before the torrent hit them Pevah spoke words she could not understand and the storm stopped, or else slowed enough to pass them by without the strength or speed to do them harm. She saw the others marveling with her as the sand passed them like swaths of time, like broken hourglasses spilled underwater. The grains flew like golden beads, and even the bits of blood that trailed between like links in chains appeared as rubies.

  When the sand passed them by or touched their skin and fell, the time that held it resumed its former pace. All around them but for the small pocket in which they stood, the land was pitted with fist-sized craters that stretched for half a league to east and south. The beast had sent the sand with such force that it would have ripped them all to shreds where they stood.

  It had done that very thing to those who had stood enraptured before it. Another dozen warriors fallen and broken apart while the lucky few had managed to skitter around the base of the dune and find refuge on the northern flats. Some had even nested up beneath the sloped sides, avoiding the spray by being too close, and now they wore a fresh, primal fear that Iyana could not help but delight in seeing.

  “Not quite what they imagined,” Iyana said.

  “So much more,” Pevah said. He was breathing in long, rasping gouts, his breath steaming in the coolness though he was slick with damp. His hands were curled into an approximation of fists, and his form still wore that blur that seemed to come from within him—the time he had gathered like a weapon and meant to use.

  Creyath stepped before them as Ceth walked up next to Pevah. The Ember sank to one knee and closed his eyes, and Iyana felt the heat swirling in the air and making pops in the atmosphere. He set his Everwood blade down and drew the black bow from around his oiled shoulders, the wood already steaming in the damp it made of his evaporated sweat. There were two black shafts in that long quiver, and he drew one and stuck it in the buzzing turf beside him as the next explosion of sand sent a higher shower that pelted them like earthen rain. He held another shaft in his left hand, and Iyana saw the black wood go from dark to amber to gold as the Second Keeper shared his fire with it.

  The Midnight Dunes were no more. Where before there had been great mountains of sand whose permanence was just the latest in a land of secrets and lies, now there was a moving maelstrom of black and red. The sky broke and a wave floored all but for Ceth, who stood to face the conjured wind, fists balled at his sides. Iyana stood on quivering legs and then the sound hit them in full as the beast broke free of its bonds and roared.

  Now she could see it, and what a mighty thing it was.

  The great torso rose, showers and streams of golden-red sand falling around it like a curtain. Its hands could have belonged to an ape or a man or something between the two, and its bowed legs did not lengthen but rather sank into the soft spill it had made of its former prison. Its black skin was covered with a purple sheen that pulsed like the beating of the heart Iyana swore she could see in its chest—a deeper darkness set against the rest.

  Its eyes were purple pits that shone like amethysts. Atop its crown were horns that curled like those of the rams Iyana had spied in the Valley during the Bright Days—during the days these were meant to be. Its head was larger than the ape Larren Holspahr had slain at Last Lake, and its open maw was bordered by black fangs that appeared as smaller mountains set against the ridges of its jaw.

  It was a beast made of wrath, and it was awesome to behold. Iyana felt a fool for thinking anything the World Apart had sent for them in the grips of the Dark Months could call itself the same.

  The beast roared and broke them from their shared shock, but there was another sound beneath it, rising higher with the passing rush the beast’s throat made of the wind and air and desert sky. It was laughter, and it came from the Sage of the Red Waste.

  All eyes seemed to bend toward the old man as he cackled with manic glee at the monstrosity before them—the black god who seemed to break the air apart with foreboding and threat. Pevah was no more, and in his place was a creature of bitter madness Iyana was loath to look upon even as she moved closer to him, just like the rest.

  The Night Lord’s purple eyes—dark and yet blazing with an inner fire Iyana had no doubt could scald the toughest of hides—fixed on the old man who was now something closer to the frightening, loping figure they had seen carve pale throats beneath the sands to the east.

  Iyana had a strange impression as she observed those split lips and needle teeth, the elongated fingers and black claws. She saw a king among the desert foxes, perched atop an Everwood tree. The hunters of this land watched him from afar and dropped to their knees when they passed his ways and used his carven roads. None looked at him directly, for to do so was to court his attention, his mischief and perhaps his ire. He was not benevolent nor was he cruel. He was a being of the west and the west had made him, and now here was another to challenge him … one Iyana held no doubt could do more than that.

  “Do you remember me, beast?” Pevah said, his voice carrying across the frozen distance like a thrown stone.

  The purple fires in their pits did not flare nor did they flash. They only flickered, deadly and intent. The creature was still but for the strange thrumming, like a blur or a watery haze that hung over its jet-black skin and permeated the contours of muscle that worked on some machinery the World could never make.

  Pevah continued to speak to the titan—at least, his voice did, but Iyana felt a tug on her sleeve and saw Sen motioning toward the old man. Iyana looked and had to wipe the confusion from her eyes. His lips were moving, but the sounds didn’t match those that drifted and raced across the white flats toward the Night Lord. Pevah’s voice had been split, and the whispered one was meant for Creyath.

  The Second Keeper knelt just a stride before the Sage, his Everwood shaft glowing bright as dawn before him. Iyana saw beads of sweat gathered along his skin that turned to hissing steam that rode the currents of his heat. Ceth watched him closely, looking between the Ember and the old man as he took in their exchange.

  Iyana sidled closer to hear it, Ket letting out a low warning that drew her gaze to the north and back to the painted warriors who had survived the summoning that had been their great deed, a deed that had killed their brothers and sisters and doomed their World. They stood, haphazard and crazed, their wide eyes betraying their rapture. They looked like beings intent on proving something to the god they had freed, and Iyana swallowed as she considered what it might be.

  “Captain Talmir tells me you have fought against the like,” Pevah was saying as his other voice continued to berate the beast, to remind it of its defeat at his hands—an approach that had Iyana quaking and wanting to grab the Sage and shake sense into him.

  “Nothing close,” Creyath said, his voice as stoic as ever.

  Iyana had heard of Creyath Mit’Ahn’s deeds. She had heard of how he had stood atop the walls of Hearth as one of the Night Lords—an imitation of the true thing, she knew now—had come against the white stones. He had stood alone and he had broken its skull and taken its life with a single stroke. But his name had been made years earlier, back before she had been born. Then, the Dark Kind were only an occasional scourge, but there were bigger things nesting in the Deep Lands—the lands made by the White Crest’s fateful clash with the true beasts of the World Apart, by those this monster counted as fellows. Creyath had retreated from the Rockbled into
one of the deepest, darkest parts of lands that were deeper and darker than any other in the Valley. He had come out changed by whatever he had seen. Whatever he had fought and slain.

  Iyana looked at the Second Keeper with the eyes of a child bereft of the wonder such tales could conjure in an unformed mind. She knew Creyath Mit’Ahn as Second Keeper of Hearth. She knew him as the only Ember to slay a Night Lord before they knew the truth of what the beasts were. Now, here he was. Landkist, no doubting, and brave as any other.

  But no match for what had come. And no pretending to be.

  The warriors of the Valley looked as though their hope had fled, as if they had kept to the belief that Creyath could lay low such a thing—that a single blow from his famed Everwood could undo what one of the gods of the World had been unable to. The red- and gray-sashes watched the exchange with veiled looks.

  For his part, Pevah did not look concerned. His blood-red eyes still focused on the beast he had fought a generation before. A beast that was remembering him. A beast that was eerily still and looked ready to explode at any moment.

  “You are Ember,” Pevah said, as if that was all the encouragement Creyath needed—as if he was a child being coaxed along by his father. “You will find your fire, and that one will know it soon enough.” He nodded toward the Night Lord, and now the creature threw its head back and opened its maw wide.

  At first, no sound came out, but Iyana saw it before she heard it. The atmosphere seemed to warp, the stars in their lavender-blue curtain shimmering as if drowned, and the sound of it was deafening to behold.

  “I only have two shafts,” Creyath said, uncowed, but Iyana thought she saw a quiver touch his lips and betray his shoulders. It was the closest to fear she could recall seeing on the man, though she wondered if it might be the strain of building so much heat without letting it out. The shaft in his hand was now too bright to look upon directly, and now it drew the attention of the Night Lord that would be its target. The beast did not seem afraid.