The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  Iyana felt tears sting her cheeks and smelled the iron in the blood that renewed its dripping from her chin. Blood that was not her own and perhaps that should have been.

  “What can we do?” she asked, more to herself than the Sage. Sen looked from one to the other, his face grim.

  “The best we can,” Pevah said, setting his feet. Sen moved toward him and turned to face the fight that had moved farther away, Ket and the Valley soldiers having taken the upper hand.

  “Why do you not use your full power?” Iyana asked, hating the desperation that filled her voice. She had seen enough of death in these lands, but so far had not seen it come to those she truly loved.

  His face went hard. “There are worse things than even he,” he said, holding the thrashing Night Lord in his sights. “I expect we’ll see soon enough.”

  Iyana shook her head, unable to parse the thought. Creyath had turned his walk to a run. He tore through the lavender petals of flame, his own blade flaring as he did. His black skin seemed so much lighter than the beast he approached, his own veins swirling with the colors of the sun instead of something that would snuff it out.

  “Creyath!” Iyana called. “The heart!” she cried. “Take his heart!”

  If he heard the words he gave no indication, but she saw his true speed then and it was a marvel to behold. He ran toward a being that should have been called a god—that very likely was. A being whose like had coerced the Sages to ply waters they never should have and whose home gave rise to horrors that now infected their own. He raced unerring, forward, leaping and then arcing like one of the shafts he had loosed before.

  The purple fires widened as the Ember came down, and he struck with a sound like thunder. When the smoke cleared, Iyana saw a golden firefly darting beneath the great black feet of the Night Lord, striking with flashing cracks, each blow the herald of a new storm while Ceth wheeled overhead, coming down on the crown with that strange and conjured weight that knocked the beast off-balance.

  The fear she felt on Creyath’s behalf evaporated as she saw him at work, fighting something he couldn’t hope to beat. Her kin. The Landkist against the titans of the World Apart. It was like a painting from a storybook. It was like Creyath’s legend made real and placed in another time, more impressive and unbelievable than any of the conjured stories or tales that had cropped up in the Valley following deeds he refused to own.

  She felt a presence beside her and whirled, expecting one of the painted faces to sneer as the blade rammed home. Instead, she saw Ket with his hair sticking to the sweat and salt and sand that coated a face that already looked older than it had been. Behind him, the fight was done, the warriors that called this land home and this creature god strewn about like dolls as her own came up to watch the fight they could have no part in.

  Iyana found herself moving between Sen and Pevah. She glanced sidelong at the old man and saw his eyes shining in a way that made him look more human than his outward appearance would suggest. His hands no longer trembled but were steady, his black nails glistening like blades. There was a strange blur about his red hood, which now had the consistency of fur, and Iyana thought perhaps the Between was showing her a glimpse of the truth beneath—even more than the others saw.

  She stood alongside him and looked out over the flat toward the battle that might decide their fates and those of thousands more. A strange sort of calm settled over her like a blanket despite the circumstances. It was a knowing that she had done all she could—that they all had. A feeling that the burden had shifted toward two men who would have wanted nothing more, no matter what they might say.

  “Pevah,” she said, sounding the word out as if for the first time. The old man looked at her, and despite his new appearance—his true face—he looked as soft as he ever had before, his sad gaze containing a wisdom that reminded her of Mother Ninyeva. “Pevah …”

  She looked at him, bored those red pools that no longer called up blood so much as the red clay and sandstorms of the lands that had made him—lands farther west than here and farther north. Lands that were cold and barren, but not without life. Not without a sparse sort of plenty.

  “It means ‘father,’ doesn’t it?” she asked. He smiled and the look seemed to break his heart even as it threatened to do the same to hers. He looked beyond her, his eyes welling as he picked out the red-sashes that had called him so for the century since the Emberfolk had left these lands, and to the gray-sashes who had come down from the cliffs a generation before, bringing a champion and a need for the same.

  The Night Lord roared and the sound shook the sky and echoed at their backs as it reached the cliffs. It was an empty sound, no life or want or reason beneath it. But the cracks of Ceth’s fists and the pops Creyath’s blade made against its hide sounded like tolling bells.

  They were silent for a time, and each passing beat made it more clear that the Landkist would not win. Still, Iyana did not feel the fear that should have risen in her. She saw the bright tethers of their watching line swaying above them like grass from another realm, and felt a peace knowing she was among them. She had the strange question of where the tethers went when their light was gone, and thought the answer was not one to frighten.

  “You fear the Eastern Dark will come,” Iyana said.

  “I know he will. I know he is.”

  If Ket, Jes and the others heard, they made no move to show their fear at the thought. How could that be worse compared to what they witnessed now?

  “Why?” Iyana asked, knowing it was futile to know. “Why would he send this upon the World?” She extended a hand toward the Night Lord. “Does he hate us so?”

  Pevah laughed without mirth.

  “This was a challenge meant to occupy me and my brother who would be your protector,” he said. “Nothing more. A piece of the conflict I never asked for. The War of Sages, as you call it.” He paused and then shrugged, a human motion that didn’t fit. “It worked. I’ve been tied to these lands ever since, keeping it dormant.” He looked to the north. “I thought the Eastern Dark had planted the seeds in the Blood Seers’ minds, but now I know the beast was more clever than I thought. It has a voice, it would seem. A convincing one. Perhaps this is the one who drew him beyond the curtain in the first place, before he was the Eastern Dark. Ray Valour: a name to inspire many things, but never dread. Not before.”

  “Ray Valour,” Iyana said. She said it again. She said it three times and never did it call up the same hate she knew to attach to the name they had called him in the Valley core for her entire life and well beyond that. He should not have had a name. He was the Eastern Dark. His was a name that conjured all the impressions you didn’t need to be Landkist to gather. All the hate and hurt and bile it called up, and all the cold and scary stories from the tales that were never meant to come real to the children who heard them.

  But he was real. It was all real. Iyana looked out over the field of white sand and watched a battle of such vibrancy and movement play out before her that it made the rest of the world look dim and lesser because of it. She felt both lucky to see it and doomed to know where it was heading, and for the first time she felt she would rather be holding a sharpened length of steel than the power she had and could do nothing with. Sen ground his teeth beside her, seeming to feel the same.

  The Night Lord abandoned the fight for a time and raised up as if remembering. It reared back and let loose another cry that seemed a call, and when it lowered its head and sent that burning gaze forward, it locked on Pevah and narrowed, sinews bunching and land cracking beneath it as it tensed to spring.

  Creyath fought his way through the field of purple fire, the stuff seeming to burn him some despite his immunity to the fire of the World. Ceth touched down between the brightest and most wild patches for the briefest of moments before launching skyward once more. He was slowing, but the beast had yet to gain its full speed. Its full power. The northern Landkist landed atop its crown and struck a black horn, breaking it off at the ben
d, and the Night Lord forgot its new quarry and spun, revealing a barbed tail Iyana hadn’t noticed before that nearly decapitated Creyath, who leapt to clear it.

  The red-sashes and the gray crowded behind the man they knew as grandfather to the children who huddled in the darkness to the east or played along the shore of the subterranean lake, not knowing it was a time to be fearful and uncertain.

  There was no thought of running in any of them. Their charge had changed form and manner, but it was still clear before them. The beast was loose. The beast had to die or be put back, even if it couldn’t.

  The soldiers of the Valley stood with their leather armor and forged weapons, and rather than looking from one to another as they had before, they only watched and waited for that black and bright doom to strike out for them. Iyana felt a pride seeing it, seeing men and women who would die for a cause that came out winless. They seemed almost to wish they had not slain all of the painted warriors now their blades had gone still and grown cold. Some bent to wash them in the dry sand and then gave it up, the surrounding lands having changed into a thin and crusted gum now that the majestic Midnight Dunes had been scattered to the winds.

  “What happened, Pevah?” Iyana asked, her voice lilting and seeming to float as if in a dream. “To the World? To us?”

  It was a big question asked small, and there was a lot in it—much of guilt and even accusation she tried not to make plain—but she knew he would answer it.

  “I tried to stop him,” he said, halting. “I tried to stop them. At least, that’s what I’ve told myself in the years—centuries—since.”

  A flare of yellow fire went red as it clashed with a new gout of lavender in the west, and the Night Lord played out behind it, roaring like a shadow made on the wall of a cave. Iyana had never seen an Ember’s flare sent so far and so fully-formed. She knew Creyath was praised for his control, and she wondered if he had been holding a piece of himself in for years—for his whole life, maybe—in preparation for this moment. She tried not to think that he could win and focused on the answers that hadn’t yet come.

  It seemed they needed prompting after all.

  “Where and what, Pevah?” She turned her emerald greens on him and saw a flicker in the red as he took in her unintentional attempt to coerce and turned it back. Iyana felt a shiver and looked away, but the threat had gone from his eyes.

  “The Landkist were not the first powers we knew in the World,” Pevah said. “In that, your stories are true, even if they change from place to place and time to time.”

  She knew he spoke of humanity and centuries beyond counting. She knew now he held himself apart and made no attempt to show otherwise. She knew he was the Sage now and had been then, and she could never see him as an old man, but rather as a fox—the first of them who could have been the last—taken on a form he had grown to love and loathe in equal measure.

  “Me and mine,” he said. “We went searching. We found power beneath the rules of the World you know. We called it rule and you call it nature. Some call it Mother and others Father. There might be something else to that,” he shrugged, “but if there is, I haven’t been able to know it for certain.”

  He sighed as Ceth leapt and shouldered the beast in the chest. It let out a crack of thunder, cleaner than the strikes and crackling, spitting tails and scythes Creyath put out. The Night Lord stumbled back and then landed its second blow on the Landkist. This one was hard, and direct, and Ceth tumbled sickly in a way that froze Iyana’s heart and stopped Pevah’s breath.

  Creyath continued the fight as Ceth rolled over and came up, his silver hair catching a shaft of errant starlight and betraying a streak of red they could see from afar. He stood on wavering legs and turned back toward the west, his shoulders slumped, his bearing despondent. His walk became a run and he rejoined the fray, determined, it seemed, to die.

  “There are other Worlds,” Pevah said. “One other, at least. It isn’t so much a place as something between places.” He shot a clever look at Iyana that held an unrealized wink. “Not the road you often travel. That is something else entire, and I’ve only known it on the briefest of terms.”

  The Between. Iyana marveled that a being as old, wise and seemingly powerful as one who could bend time to his will knew less of her power even than she, and less by far than the old woman who had trained her in its ways, or had started to.

  “There was power there, rolled up in all the black and hate,” he continued, his voice taking on an edge. “It was a vast place. It felt empty and full all at once.” He spat, and Iyana saw red in the wet that struck the sand at his feet. “Its seeming emptiness was a ploy, we later knew. The Night Lords and their Sentinels are smarter than we thought. Our delving opened ways they saw plain but did not use until we turned away and went back to our toils in the World. Back to our follies and mistakes, and sometimes,” he tilted his head, wistful, “sometimes our triumphs and great works.”

  The horizon lit like dawn, Creyath’s brighter flames winning out the latest clash, and for a spell the sky didn’t look so poisoned.

  “We found the rifts and closed them,” Pevah said. “We found the Dark Kind that had spilled in like a plague and smote them. We lost some.” He swallowed. “We left that place and turned away. All but one of us, who kept digging in the graveyard. Kept toiling, plying darker waters and farther shores. All for his betterment he mistook for ours.”

  “The Eastern Dark.” Iyana nodded as if she had known it all along.

  “Yes,” Pevah said. “Him. The Sage of Center learned the truth first and would not forgive it. He is the one who drove my brother to the east and the south, deep into lands he had changed and made strange, bonding it with the World Apart to make a place we could not travel and maintain our power.”

  “But,” Iyana started and then stopped, but Pevah only regarded her lightly. The emotion he had held had gone out. He had grown into the telling and it no longer stung him so. “The War of Sages,” she said. “It is said you all fought amongst yourself. Against one another, and not against him alone.”

  Another smile, and one of a more bitter crook. “Power corrupts,” he said. “And power, Iyana Ve’Ran, is relative.” He flashed a look to Sen that seemed to cow the other Faeykin before the Sage turned back to her. The others had drawn closer, like children around a ring of stones, the fire a strange nightmare one playing out just a few stones’ throw to the west. “Lines were drawn and sides were taken, and abandoned … and taken again. Battles were fought and they became bitter. More died. The Sages dwindled, and those who remained grew fat off the power they stole, or lean and wanting off the guilt of having taken it.”

  He looked back to the west and blinked, paling at whatever he saw behind those lined and weathered lids. Iyana tried to bend the shape of her thoughts to include forgiveness for the other Sages—those who stood against him. She tried to imagine what he might have done to call up such a look and thought it better not to dwell.

  Apparently, so did he.

  “The Landkist were a welcome distraction for some of us,” he said, voice growing confident and calm once more. “A welcome addition to others—pawns to be used on a board not of their making. The War of Sages has continued since your coming and grown more subtle because of it.” He shrugged. “Perhaps that’s better for the World. In the place of armies of men, the Sages who fought in recent centuries did it with smaller groups of the World’s gifted.”

  “Where did they come from?” Sen asked, his voice sounding almost childlike. “The Landkist, I mean.” There was a need in the question that Iyana understood as none of the rest could. There would not be another opportunity to learn from someone who had been there. Iyana knew it. They all did, and none seemed to mind that they spent what could very well be their last moments asking questions of an old man at the edge of the desert, so very far from home and yet nested in its bosom all the same.

  “That I do not know,” Pevah said, and Sen’s look carried all the disappointment Iyana t
ried to hide. “But then,” he said, turning to them and then scanning the company behind and around them, “where did men come from? Where did the forests and the trees? The sands and the deserts? The foxes and the voles they hunt?” He smiled at the faces he saw. “Power is power,” he said, “but it does not beget knowledge.”

  Sen nodded, regaining some of his former composure. Iyana noticed the blood on his face and wiped at her own, wincing at how quickly her white fingers were dyed with it. Pevah gave her a sympathetic look.

  “There is so much more,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “So much that led us to this point,” he looked back to the small war in the west. “Much of it weighs on the collective conscience of my brothers, sisters and me. The Twins may have been the only ones who never cared at the horrors they wrought, but they were a nasty sort who got sorted—one of the few good deeds the Eastern Dark’s dogs did, and for reasons I can’t begin to guess at. Your Ember King was in that company, after he’d turned or been turned to his side,” he said. “Ceth was there the day of the fight that took the Twins down. I don’t think he thanked anyone for it.”

  “Perhaps they betrayed him,” Iyana said. “The Twins and the Eastern Dark.”

  “Perhaps,” Pevah did not sound convinced. “Or perhaps it’s all wrapped into the same. Into his endgame, whatever it might be.” He sighed again. “He’s never thought himself wrong. At least, he’s never admitted it if he has. He’s always been smart, that one. Smarter than Balon. Smarter than the Twins by far. Smarter than me. But there’s a sickness in him that’s hard to come by. It’s as if he thinks he’s the only one. There was a word for that the old thinkers used to use.” He quirked his head and then shook it, giving the thread up.

  “Even now, I’d help him,” he said, seeming surprised by his own admission. “Even now, after all he’s done, I would help him if it meant putting things right.”

  “Fear drives a being like that.” The voice belonged to Martah, who watched Ceth fight on his dying winds. “So,” she added, not looking at anyone in particular, “what frightens a man like that?”