“The village hasn’t gone anywhere, Ciara.”
They stepped out from beneath the canopy created by the blanket. Ciara glanced around and saw the tall stone tower that she’d so often tried—and failed—to climb. The rest of the village, mostly buildings of stone built against the wall of rock, though some built into caverns in the rock itself, looked no different than the last time she’d been here. It seemed so long ago.
Something about the village seemed off, but she couldn’t place what it was at first. It might be the amount of time she’d been gone. As one of the nya’shin, she’d left the village for days before, but never for two weeks at a time.
The sun arced down from high in the sky, sending heat burning through her elouf. Ciara closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them in a snap. “Where’s the rest of the village?”
She knew what she’d felt, and why the village felt strange: there weren’t as many people as she expected.
It wasn’t that the village was emptier than it should be. Water sensing told her that was the case, just as it told her how Fas’s heart beat steadily in his chest and that her father waited for her in the shadows of the stone tower. No, this was different. Always before, she’d been able to detect others of the village, using water sensing to know where they were even if they had wandered away. She didn’t sense near what she should, as if the people were simply missing.
Ciara looked to Fas for answers.
He sighed and shook his head. “They’re gone, Ciara. All of them. Gone.”
6
Ciara
Lands that once were immune to the attack no longer have such protection. Even now the war spreads. So far, none recognize that it is about more than men and nation.
—Lren Atunal, Cardinal of the College of Scholars
The sun didn’t make it very far inside the caverns, leaving the hint of shadows that played at the edge of the light. Ciara shivered when she saw them and stepped back toward the entrance. Fas noticed what she did and watched her with an amused smile, and Ciara turned away, not wanting to explain why she wanted to be away from the shadows.
“You don’t have to stop there,” her father said.
“This is fine.” She glanced around the room.
Her father had it decorated plainly. A thick leather hide stretched across the center of the room; the short fur of the dela would still be soft underfoot. Other drawn hides lay across the ground next to it, but the dela was the prize, a horned animal not found in Rens any longer, chased away from the rock at nearly the same time her people had been chased away from their great cities.
Her father met her eyes and nodded. “Tell me, daughter, how did you manage to survive on the waste?”
Ciara glanced over to Fas, wondering if her father would react in the same way Fas had. “Water flowers.”
Her father took a seat atop a ledge of rock, groaning as he lowered himself. “Water flowers. I had not known that you knew of them.”
Ciara frowned and took a hesitant step into the room. If her father was here, the room had to be safe. Her whole life, she’d found safety where her father was, so there was no point in fearing the shadows around him. The strange shadow man wouldn’t be found here anyway, would he?
“I didn’t.” She needed to explain to her father what had happened, regardless of how it made her sound. Would he chastise her, or would he accuse her of having visions? Either way, it didn’t matter. She had been returned to the village, to her people, and the lizard had helped.
“You didn’t.” He tapped at the ground with his j’na, the carvings beneath his hand long ago faded, smoothed by his massive hands over the years. The osidan tip was darker than most she’d seen, the metal catching the remaining light around the cavern and reflecting it, pushing back some of the shadows, even if not nearly enough for her. “You risked yourself trying an unknown plant in the waste?”
“I’m a senser, Father,” she said. “And I risked myself simply remaining in the waste. Why shouldn’t I have tried anything that would have given me the chance at survival?”
Her father looked past her, his heavy gaze stopping on Fas before turning back to her. “Fas tells me that you gave him most of the remaining water. That you shouldn’t have been able to survive the crossing.”
Ciara felt Fas’s hot gaze on her back and a flush worked through her. Blast him for making her feel this way, even after what happened!
She pushed the emotion back, suppressing it as well as she could. “He was sick, barely recovered from the attack.”
“I was—”
Ciara cut him off, forging ahead. “So at the time, the choice was simple. He can shape water. He is more important to the village. And we had only enough water for one to return.”
The other would have to find water in the waste. It should not have been possible, but she’d survived.
“A decision only a true nya’shin would make,” her father remarked.
“What happened to the others?” Ciara asked. She hesitated even asking, knowing that her father would ache at the loss, but she needed to know. Had they died because she had failed to find water? If that was the case, then she was less nya’shin than she believed, regardless of what her father said. If there was another reason, she wanted to know, even if there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
“You sense their absence?”
“How can I not?”
Her father leaned forward, hanging on to his j’na as he did. The osidan tip pointed forward, sending a shimmer of light toward her and pushing back the hint of the shadows at the edge of her vision. Ciara forced herself to ignore those shadows. They weren’t real. Even if they were, she shouldn’t—she couldn’t—fear something as simple as shadows, regardless of the strange shadow man and the seductive way he’d tried calling her across the waste.
“I don’t know what you’re capable of,” her father said.
Ciara blinked, noting the question mixed into the statement.
“What happened to them?” she asked.
“Water, at first. The Stormcallers claimed rains would come, and they did, but it wasn’t enough. Not to sustain us.”
The rains never provided enough to sustain the village. Only the Great Storms, and it had been years since the last Great Storm, long enough that Ciara wasn’t certain she would even know what to do when the next came. But the rains provided the chance to find more water, to add to their stores, if only the nya’shin were able to detect it enough.
If the village withered and died like so much else in these lands because they failed to find water, then their loss truly was her fault. She had taken Fas with her on the wild hope that they would find water within the waste. Without the nya’shin, who would remain to find and collect the water?
“You blame yourself,” her father said.
“How can I not?”
“You took a chance that none had been willing to take. You wanted to bring your people to a place where they would not have to constantly search for water, give them a chance to flourish.” He tapped his j’na once, twice, and each time the sound filled the cavern more than it should. Light flashed from the osidan as he did, and Ciara wondered if he twisted the tip enough to somehow catch the light, or if he did something different that she couldn’t tell. “The fault is not with you. Nor is it with the Stormbringer.”
“Then who?” she asked.
Her father looked past her once more, and looked to Fas. “When the rains finally came, others visited. At first there were only a few. Pairs of people dressed not like shapers of Ter, but wearing strange clothing, wraps like our elouf, but not dressed for the desert.”
Ciara’s heart skipped a beat. There were others of Rens, but the villages were now scattered so far apart as to make them separate peoples. Unless some of the other villages had begun to wander. If that was the case, maybe Rens could be reunited and the people find a way to band together, find a source of water where none would have to wander, perhaps safety where they
didn’t need to fear the attacks from Ter.
Seeing her father’s face and hearing the way that he said it, she didn’t think that was what he meant. There was sadness in his eyes, and darkness.
“Who were they?”
Her father didn’t answer, his eyes taking on a faraway and lost expression, a look that was so foreign for him. As the ala’shin, he was always so confident, so capable, that for her to see him any other way was difficult for her.
“They took our healthiest,” Fas said from behind her. “They came at night and disappeared before we knew what was happening. Young, boy and girl, man and woman. They didn’t care so long as they were hale.” His voice caught as he said the last.
Ciara looked to Fas, noting his muscular build even beneath his elouf. “Why not you?”
His eyes took on a haunted expression. She could see that he’d wondered the same, or maybe he didn’t need to wonder. “The return from the waste weakened me. When they came, I was…” He took a deep breath and forced a swallow. “I was too weak for them to bother with. I couldn’t even use water against them, not that we had enough for me to even attempt.”
She tried a water sensing on him and found nothing but traces of sickness, yet something still felt off with him. “Not Ter?”
Her father took a breath and tapped his j’na on the ground in three quick taps. He stood, holding the j’na as more of a cane, pushing himself to stand. “Come,” he said as he passed her on his way out of the tavern.
“Where is he going?” she asked.
Fas shook his head. “Your father has changed since the… attack, I suppose we should call it. Withdrawn. He goes out to Nisa Point and stares, standing all alone for hours at a time.”
Her father had often gone to the point when she was young, but never for hours, and never so often that others would comment on it. Most figured he went to survey for water, that he could no longer climb the rock tower as he once had, but Ciara thought he had another reason for going. Not for water, but for quiet, to be alone, away from the steady pulsing of everyone around him that he struggled to ignore, hoping for the chance to reach her mother once more.
They followed her father. He stopped outside the cavern and waited while she and Fas climbed down, and then started to the north, climbing up the steep ridge that led to Nisa Point. Ciara noted that he moved slower than he once would have, that he relied on his j’na to catch him more often than he should, but he still managed the climb.
Out in the sun, her j’na caught the light of the sun almost as if absorbing it, as if the draasin glass wanted to swallow the light. Fas glanced at it but said nothing. The climb to the top of the point had always been challenging, but it was nothing like what she had faced climbing while out on the waste.
They reached the top, where her father faced north. “I’ve come here often of late.”
“That’s what Fas tells me.”
“Fas. He’s a good man. A strong nya’shin,” he said, as if forgetting that Fas had climbed with her. “A pairing with Fas would serve you well, I think.”
Ciara flushed. A pairing with Fas once had seemed all that she wanted. Well, that and becoming a true nya’shin. Now that she had the spear, she felt that she was nya’shin, but she no longer knew if she wanted Fas in the same way. He seemed strong enough, to be sure, but she had seen weakness in him that she couldn’t ignore.
“Father?”
He turned to her. “What happened to you while on the waste, Ciara? What did you see?”
“I…” She hesitated, looking out from the point for the first time in many years. Like many in the village, she’d climbed Nisa Point; it was a source of pride as a child, much like climbing the rock tower was a source of pride for those able to become nya’shin. But once she’d climbed Nisa, she hadn’t felt the need for many years. What was there atop the rock for her to see that she wouldn’t be able to see from atop the tower?
She would have said nothing, but the point gave her a different vantage. Now that she’d reached the peak of the tower, however much Fas might have helped, she saw that there were differences here. They lived in the midst of a hot, rocky landscape. It was not quite the waste; there, the ever-shifting dunes made navigating it difficult, if not impossible. But little grew.
From here she saw scattered plants, from the waxy-leaved cacti that thrived to the stunted and dried copach trees, and even a few small bulas shrubs. When the bulas berried after a hard rain, the ripe fruit held water along with the foul-tasting berries. Not nearly as much as the gourds brought to her by the lizard, but still enough that the nya’shin had learned to collect them and carry them with them as they traveled, searching for water.
Beyond the plants, standing atop the point revealed a single fox slinking across the rock. Ciara suspected it chased rabbits, or possibly desert mice, but what did she really know? Maybe it searched for water, much like her people did.
Then there was the haze of heat rising above the ground that reminded her of the way the sand caught the air while she was in the waste. In so many ways, the bleak and hard rock of Rens was not all that dissimilar from the waste, even though her people thought they were so different and feared crossing.
Would the lizard be found here? Did it sit out on the rock, watching over her as it had seemed to do while she crossed the desert? Or had it returned to the waste once it brought her back to her people?
“I nearly died,” she said. “I fell from a rock shelf as I tried reaching the water I sensed.”
“How far did you fall?” her father asked.
“I don’t know. Halfway down the shelf. Maybe fifty feet.” Had it really been that far? She probably shouldn’t have attempted the climb. But she’d seen the shadow man and had been convinced that he had water. And had she not, she might never have learned of the strange lizard.
“And you stand here unharmed.” He cocked his head and studied her. “But not unchanged, I think.”
She swallowed. What did her father mean?
“I wasn’t unharmed,” she said, remembering the way she felt after landing, the way that her body throbbed, with everything hurting her. “But I had help.”
Her father nodded slowly, as if he had expected it. “Shadow or light?”
Ciara frowned. “I don’t—”
He raised a hand and cut her off. “Do not make claims you know are untrue, Ciara.”
He knew. Somehow, he knew.
She refused to look over at Fas, wishing he wasn’t here for what she would say, but her father deserved honesty from her. “When Fas left, I sensed water. Enough water that we would no longer have to wander, enough that I wanted nothing more than to find it and bring our people to it.”
“When did you sense this?” Fas asked. “There was no water when I left that night, nothing that would have drawn even you.”
“I walked for hours after you left, but the ledge never changed. It remained the steep shelf that I’d have to descend if I wanted to reach anything different.” She remembered the way sand billowed off the top of the ledge, blowing from the waste to the hard rock below. It hung in the air, hovering above everything like the haze she saw stretching out from her now. When she reached the ground, she found no sign of the sand on the rock below. “Always, I sensed water below me, drawing me forward.”
“Down,” her father said. “Toward the shadows.”
She swallowed again. Could he know? Did he know what she’d seen or how she’d gone with the shadow man, wanting to reach the source of water that she would still swear she sensed below?
“Shadows, yes,” Ciara whispered.
“But you returned.”
She nodded. “How do you know of this?”
“When I was a child in Pa’shu, the priests of the Stormbringer used to tell stories. There wasn’t the same search for water then, though the river would often go dry, and they would talk of times long past as if they had been there.” He closed his eyes, his brow creasing. “They said that there is a battle between
shadow and light, of creatures of power stronger than any of us, greater than any shaper of Ter. They have battled for millennia, darkness trying to conquer the light.” He shook his head. “I always thought it nothing but stories until we retreated to these lands. Here… here I think I can feel the darkness at times.”
Ciara shivered, thinking of the way the lizard had spoken inside her mind. Had that been the shadow or the light? But the shadow man… There was no question about him. What would it mean that she spoke to the shadow? What would it mean if she couldn’t reach the light?
“They claimed that the draasin,” her father went on, “were creatures of light. They have long been among the greatest, battling against the shadow, burning with their heat. The priests claim that’s the reason Rens embraced the heat and fire of these lands, knowing that no shadow could live here, that only the light burns where the draasin fly.”
He turned to stare outward, looking away from the village and out over the point. “There is something out there. I can feel it but do not know what it means. From what I see of you since you returned from the waste, I know that you sense it too. Tell me, daughter, what did you experience on the waste? What is it that brought you back to us? What do you know about these old stories?”
Ciara thought about what the lizard had said, the only thing she remembered from the strange creature. Hadn’t there been some comment about darkness coming? Did that mean the lizard was a part of darkness, or was it a part of light?
“I don’t know,” she said.
She sensed it as Fas took a step closer to her, shifting his feet as he moved toward the ridgeline leading down and away from the point. His heart hammered more rapidly in his chest. Was it fear or something else that drove him?
“Don’t know? What did you see?” her father asked.
“I saw,” she began, thinking of what had happened while she was out on the waste, “draasin. They were injured, and those of Ter attacked.” She had stopped them, hadn’t she, but had she been fast enough? She had been taught to revere the draasin, that the creatures of fire deserved her respect, but she had never before known why. Maybe what her father described was the reason why.
Darkness Rising (The Endless War Book 2) Page 6