Nightpeople

by Anthony Eaton

  There had been no pursuit. Since leaving the encampment they had made their way steadily nightwards into the empty expanse, a vacant horizon in all directions. Dariand led, followed by Saria, then Slander’s beast, tethered to Dreamer Gaardi’s, and finally Gan. They travelled in silence, speaking only when necessary.

  And now they were almost there.

  Up high on the camel, without the constant contact between her feet and the ground, the call had faded. But every time they stopped and climbed down to rest the animals it was there, stronger each time, always nightwards.

  ‘When will we see it?’

  ‘Around sunrise.’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘And it’s really impossible to cross.’

  ‘If it wasn’t, do you think we’d all still be here?’

  His question hung between them for a long time.

  ‘Why are we still here?’ Saria finally asked him.

  ‘We’re here because you think you need to follow this call all the way to the Darkedge.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean all of us. The Darklanders. Why do you think the Nightpeople have let us go on this long?’

  ‘Not because they wanted to, that’s for sure. Why’d they take all our women and good children except to kill us off?’

  ‘But they’re powerful. I saw their hummer, and listened to them. They can fly and make skyfire. If they wanted to kill us, they could do it easily, any time they wanted to. They haven’t, though. Why not?’

  Dariand looked at her for a long time.

  ‘I can’t answer that, Saria. Nobody can. Not even Dreamer Wanji could’ve explained that. No one knows what the Nightpeople want, or why they do the things they do. Hell, after your experience in the Shifting House, you probably know more about them than anyone else in the history of the Darklands.’

  Saria thought about this. ‘You know what I think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think they’re scared of us. I think they need something from us, and they’re scared we won’t give it to them.’

  ‘Need something from us?’ Dariand laughed. ‘What? Sand? Coldbloods? We’ve got nothing they want, Saria.’

  ‘They want me.’

  ‘They want you because that’ll mean the end of all of us.’

  ‘How do we know that?’

  ‘Dreamer Wanji told you, you’re the last child. And the last Dreamer. It’s about taking away our hope.’

  ‘But how do we know? How did Dreamer Wanji know? It doesn’t add up. That afternoon in the Shifting House, one of those Nightpeople was scared, and not just a little bit. It was really terrified about something.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why would they be out here if it wasn’t for something important? One of them was convinced that it was risking its life for nothing, but the other one – the leader – wasn’t. Why would they risk their lives trying to catch me when they could easily kill us all off, if that’s what they really wanted.’

  Dariand was about to reply, but a low whistle floated through the air, and both twisted to watch Gan urging her own animal towards theirs.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’ She pointed behind, daywards, where their tracks extended through the sand leaving a trail as clear and straight as one of the ancient Skypeople’s roads.

  ‘Ah, bugger!’

  The horizon behind them was lit from one end to the other by a wall of crisscrossing nightsuns. From this distance the tiny beams looked small, but they were coming closer.

  ‘That’s not a patrol,’ Dariand muttered.

  ‘You reckon they’re after us?’

  ‘I’d say.’

  They watched the approaching wall of light.

  ‘Any ideas?’ Gan looked at Dariand.

  ‘Dunno.’ He scratched his chin as he turned, scanning the surrounding landscape. ‘No shelter out here, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘What’s happenin’?’ Dreamer Gaardi and Slander had caught up to them, and Gan reached across, halting the two animals.

  ‘Nightpeople.’

  ‘Patrol?’

  ‘Nah. Hundreds of them.’

  ‘They’ll be followin’ the tracks, I reckon.’ Gan looked thoughtful.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Only one thing for it, then.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’ll split up. Me and Dreamer Gaardi will take Slander and head that way.’ Gan pointed at right angles to their course. ‘And you two go the other way. With a bit of luck they’ll keep after us and not you.’

  Dariand thought for a moment or two. The desert seemed to be holding its breath.

  ‘Time to go different ways, eh?’ Dreamer Gaardi spoke into the silence.

  A distant, low hum echoed through the night. The sound helped Dariand make up his mind.

  ‘Alright. We’ll meet at the valley.’

  He clicked his tongue and his camel dropped to the ground, and Saria did the same. Then he tethered the two animals together and handed the lead to Gan.

  ‘What’ll we do with him?’ She nodded back at Slander.

  ‘Dunno. I was gonna take him back to Woormra and use him to sort out the problems there, but it’s a bit late for that, I reckon.’

  ‘Why don’t we just leave him here?’

  ‘No. Don’t take him to the valley, either. Just dump him somewhere on the way. Somewhere with a bit of water and food, but not too much. Make him work to stay alive.’

  Slander, who’d been listening closely, began making frantic groaning noises through his gag, and after a moment’s thought Dariand stepped across and untied it.

  ‘Don’t be bastards.’ Slander choked out the words. ‘You can’t just dump me.’

  ‘You killed Dreamer Wanji, and you blinded Dreamer Gaardi.’ Dariand’s voice was level. ‘You don’t deserve anything from us, Slander. You’re lucky we’ve kept you this long.’

  ‘You’re a fool, Dariand. You know that?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘A bloody idiot. You think you can escape? Don’t be stupid. Why don’t you just hand her over to them right now and be done with it.’ He spat into the sand.

  ‘Give ‘em what they want? That’s your advice is it, Slander?’

  ‘You might as well. They know about her anyway, and they’ll never stop looking. They want her just as much as you do. Even more.’

  A look passed between Dariand and Gan.

  ‘And how do you know that, eh?’

  Even slung across the back of the camel, Slander managed to look defiant.

  ‘So I had dealings with them. I had to keep my town going. It’s fine for you lot with your clean water and decent Dreamer. I did what I had to.’

  ‘Rubbish, Slander. All you want is power. That’s all it’s ever been with you. You thought the Nightpeople’d give it to you, so you were prepared to sell her off. You couldn’t give a damn about the future of the Darklands.’

  ‘The Darklands has no future, you idiot,’ Slander hissed. ‘The only ones stupid enough to believe that it has are you and a handful of old men like him.’ He gestured at Dreamer Gaardi. ‘The only future this forsaken land has is what the Nightpeople will let us have, and if that young girl’s the cost of it, then fair enough, I say.’

  ‘That’s all this is about to you, isn’t it. Power. You think they’ll give you more power than you can get in your own right. So you’re prepared to sell out to the Nightpeople. At any cost.’

  ‘Either way, it doesn’t matter.’ Slander nodded daywards at the approaching hummers. ‘You’re all stuffed now. The best you can hope is that they take her and leave the rest of you enough water to get back to Woormra.’

  A long pause followed his words. Then Dariand caught Gan’s eye again.

  ‘What do you reckon, Gan? Is he right?’

  The old woman shrugged. ‘Could be.’

  ‘We should give ‘em what they want, then.’
/>   ‘Seems a waste of a good camel, though.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll find him again later.’

  ‘Right, then.’

  Saria watched, puzzled, as Dariand untethered Slander’s animal from Dreamer Gaardi’s and turned it back to face the approaching hummers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Slander demanded.

  ‘Sending a message to the Nightpeople. You. Tell them Saria’s gone.’

  ‘You can’t do this. Don’t be a bastard.’

  ‘You’re the one that’s had dealings with them, Slander. Now you can be the one to tell them the deal is off. You said it yourself; if we want a future, we have to buy it from them, whatever the price. And right now, that price is you. With any luck, catching you will distract them long enough for the rest of us to get away.’

  ‘They’ll find you. They know about the girl, and they know she’s clean. They want her more than anything else. They won’t give a damn about me.’

  ‘You’d better hope you’re wrong about that, Slander.’ Dariand took a handful of the man’s hair and glared into his face. ‘Because if they don’t deal with you, then later on I will. You’ve got my word on that.’

  Without giving Slander an opportunity to reply, Dariand delivered the camel a slap on its rump with the palm of his hand and immediately it started trotting straight towards the Nightpeople. Against the approaching glare, it stayed silhouetted for a long time before vanishing over a rise.

  ‘We have to move. Now,’ Dariand said.

  Gan agreed. ‘Grabbing him might slow them down a little bit, but they’ll still be coming. And he’ll tell ‘em we’re splitting up. They’ll just come straight after you.’

  ‘No, they won’t.’ Dariand untethered his and Saria’s camels, then slapped their rumps and shouted, spooking them until they were also galloping away, parallel to the nightwards horizon, leaving a clear trail in the direction Dariand and Saria were to have taken.

  ‘We’ll continue nightwards by foot. They’ll chase our camels first, and when they find them abandoned they’ll most likely come after you two. Don’t go back to the valley, either.’

  ‘Where’ then?’

  Dariand thought for a moment.

  ‘Head for the soak. We can camp there as long as we need to. Now go.’

  ‘Dariand?’ Dreamer Gaardi reached one hand down towards Dariand’s voice.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You take care.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘And Saria?’ The old man turned his empty eye-sockets to stare unnervingly at her.

  ‘Yes, Dreamer.’

  ‘You chase that call’ eh? As far as you have to. And you dream good dreams when you get there’ for all of us.’

  ‘I will.’

  Gan’s voice was soft. ‘Come here, girl.’

  Saria stepped over to stand beside Gan’s animal. The old woman stared at her.

  ‘Good luck, eh?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Then she and Dreamer Gaardi urged their camels into a long gallop’ leaving Dariand and Saria alone in the desert.

  ‘Come on!’ Dariand took her hand and pulled it. ‘We’ll still be lucky if we get away.’

  They plunged nightwards, almost at a run. The noise of the hummers was a constant drone which shivered through the night.

  ‘Walk softly’ keep your feet light,' Dariand whispered.

  SARIA!

  Below her feet the call was stronger than ever, earthwarmth flowing into her from the ground, and back from her to the Earthmother. Saria sneaked a quick glance behind to where the sky was alive with dancing light. The harsh, focused beams lanced though the desert sky, drowning the sparse glow of the vaultlights in a frenzy of bright movement. The hummers were close enough now for Saria to make out the occasional flash reflecting off iridescent blackness as one swung through another’s beams.

  ‘We need to hide.’

  ‘Where?’ Dariand didn’t break stride. ‘There’s nowhere. Just keep running!’

  ‘They’re going to catch us.’

  The humming rose to a scream and a nightsun beam flashed across the sand a little ahead, leaving a glowing red blur across Saria’s vision.

  Then she felt something shift in the Earthmother. Some tiny change in the flow of warmth through the earth.

  ‘What is it! Come on!’ Dariand tugged at her arm, but Saria was frozen to the spot.

  She could see everything. It was reaching like she’d never done before. The earthwarmth was calming and powerful, and when she closed her eyes the whole landscape was there before her, falling away, outwards, beyond anything she’d imagined possible.

  Gan and Dreamer Gaardi were still galloping steadily away, but compared with the scale of her reaching, they might as well have been right beside her A tiny bit further off, three hummers had settled on the ground around Slander and his camel. She could even see the Nightpeople, but in an odd way. They were cold, like holes in the world, moving in detachment from everything else. Several were approaching Slander.

  ‘Saria!’ Dariand was shaking her now. ‘Come on! Move!’

  And still the horizons stretched away from her. Past the dead scar of the Shifting House, past Woormra, across the plains. She could feel it all. Olympic, Silver Lake, even the valley, so many days away now. Below her the Earthmother was a living thing, alive like nothing she’d ever reached: veins of coolness where water flowed, empty caverns and fissures, the hard bones of rock and granite and the soft earth between them.

  And through it all came a sense of constant movement and incredible, crushing pressure. And she could feel the surface, where the ground wrapped the Earthmother like skin, open and exposed to the skyvault. And there was something new there too, some strange joining of Earthmother and Skyfather.

  ‘Dig!’

  ‘What?’ Dariand looked at her as though she’d gone mad.

  ‘Dig! Here! Cover yourself with sand.’

  Saria dropped and began scraping a shallow depression in the earth.

  ‘It won’t work.’

  She stopped for only a moment to look up at him. ‘Trust me.’

  A second later, Dariand was clawing at the ground beside her.

  She sank her hands into the sand, scraping the dirt aside and feeling earthwarmth tingle through her fingers. When the hollow was deep enough, she and Dariand lay in it and pulled sand back over themselves, covering their bodies and their necks and around their heads, leaving only their faces open to the air and the sky. Lying there, cradled in the earth, an eerie calm came over her.

  ‘They’ll see us,’ whispered Dariand. ‘They’ll see where we’ve been digging.’

  ‘No, they won’t.’

  He said nothing more, because the first hummer passed directly overhead, its unearthly sound shuddering through the ground like a physical blow.

  Saria could feel the embrace of the Earthmother, energy flowing through her, into her, making her a part of it. She could feel vastness. She could feel the cold, distant hole where the crumbling remains of the Shifting House sat, reaching high into the sky and barely clinging to the surface of the Earth. She could feel the call as it came across unperceivable distance. Sighing, she let herself go completely and melted into it, became a part of it, and as the Nightpeople tore the sky apart above, their lights searching and probing, they didn’t notice anything different about the slightly ruffled patch of sand in the midst of the great plain.

  And then the sound of the hummers grew distant, echoing out to the nightwards horizon until it vanished. The glow from the nightsuns faded, to be replaced by the first blush of dawn. Away towards the daylight, Saria could feel the Nightpeople take Slander with them into one of the hummers, and as soon as it lifted from the ground his energy faded and vanished, leaving his camel to wander alone.

  ‘Have they gone?’ Dariand’s voice was a whisper.

  ‘Not quite. Soon, though.’

  ‘Are any more hummers coming back?’

  ‘I don�
�t know.’

  ‘Why not? I thought you could feel them.’

  ‘Only on the ground. In the air they’re … gone.’

  They lay in silence for a long time, until finally Saria said, ‘Okay,’ and they sat up, brushing away red sand which ran from them like water.

  The morning was advancing, the sky taking on the first hints of blue.

  ‘Why didn’t they see us?’ The look in Dariand’s eyes told her he expected an answer.

  ‘The Earthmother,’ she answered simply. ‘She protected us.’

  Dariand considered pressing the issue, but he let it go.

  ‘Look.’

  Saria followed his finger. Along the horizon, extending from one side to the other, hunched a long, low line of darkness. Even the growing dawn failed to illuminate it. As the rest of the world began to shimmer in the earthy reds and browns of the desert, that long barrier sucked up the light, absorbing it in much the same way that the walls of the Shifting House had. It looked cold.

  ‘Is that the Darkedge?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s not that big.’

  ‘You wait. It’s still a long way off.’

  They walked a little longer. The rising sun pushed away the cold of the night and Saria basked in its warmth. The call ebbed and flowed through her, and the ground felt soft beneath her bare feet. Silently, walking side by side, they continued towards the horizon, and by mid-morning, after hours of walking, the barrier seemed only a little closer. Saria studied it when they stopped for a drink. Even from this distance it filled the sky, cutting up abruptly from the desert. At regular intervals along the top strange arrays stretched even higher, topped with tiny glowing red lights.

  ‘What are those?’ She pointed.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘It’s strange.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This is the edge of the world. It’s weird to think that this is where everything just stops.’

  ‘It doesn’t.’ He shook his head in disagreement. ‘This isn’t the edge of the world, Saria. Just the edge of our world. There could be anything on the other side of that wall. We don’t know. Could be there’s two people just like us standing over there, staring daywards and wondering how they might be able to get over the Darkedge and into here.’