The Midnight Dunes by Steven Kelliher

Author:Steven Kelliher [Kelliher, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The gray-sashes and red spun and darted like wind coated in red fire.

It was already growing slick. Lucky for Talmir Caru, the siege of Hearth had prepared him to fight in such conditions. In the past, he might have tried to block out the truth of what he slipped on, told himself it was the blood of mindless beasts and enemies alone, but he knew the truth of it. He knew there was plenty of red from his own beneath his sodden boots.

He used it to earn back something of the name he’d tried to run away from for most of his life.

Talmir stepped and slid, parried and countered, slashed and stabbed. He took streaking pale hands and the black claws they carried and he took the meat and pumping blood from the throats that screeched like horrors from another world—sounds unlike anything the Dark Kind made. These were beings of the World. They were men, though misshapen and changed, and they fought like animals.

“Down,” he heard Creyath say at his back, voice even despite the circumstances. Talmir felt the heat on his back, flattening his shirt against his soaked skin and drying it instantly. Talmir squatted and the roaring comet consumed half the throng that had begun to force him back.

But there were more, and so Talmir rose along with his father’s blade and gave them the death they so eagerly sought. He did it with a bite, wasting too much energy as he tried to give back some of the hurt the beast-men had doled out at the beginning of the ambush. He earned scores and gashes that would scar ugly and blinked away tears that had nothing to do with his own hurt as he thought of how many they must’ve lost—of how many their hosts had lost.

A night of Sharing, indeed.

The screams had started from below, but Talmir had taken them for a trick of the wind at first. He had been leaning against the side of the cave mouth, watching the last flames sink lower in the ring of stones atop the shelf. He had not partaken in any of the nomads’ bitter wine, but he was tired nonetheless. Tired from his argument with Pevah and tired of waiting for Karin to come back with their wayward Faeykin.

Some of the adults among the desert folk had retired, escorting the children they seemed to share back into the bowels of the mountain like unwilling sheep. Talmir had smiled at their complaints and the way they tried to bribe their way back into the firelight and the stories some of the elders told. They wanted to talk to the strange men, they said, and it made Talmir sad to think they might’ve been family had things gone differently—had the King of Ember made a different choice.

He had taken the first sounds of alarm as little more than the echoing, discordant voices of the particularly stubborn among them, the grunts and sounds of exertion little more than the deception of the undulating surface of obsidian wall, floor and ceiling.

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