Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1) (2 page)

He surveyed the earth before the walls. Brown water pooled in shallow depressions, slick canvases that acted as natural complements to the drums that were only now quieting their complaints, something the hounds were less inclined to do.

He eyed the tree line. On a hot morning, he could bury a stone in the nearest clearing with a strong throw. Tonight was cool bordering on cold. Kole quickened his heart and set his blood to boil, feeling the heat coursing through his veins, the hafts of the blades across his back glowing a dull red in anticipation.

The moon was no ally tonight. The Dark Months might be tailing off, but it was small comfort. One could almost feel the World Apart brushing by, whispering its promises and issuing its soft challenges. Kole did not listen.

“You look worried.”

Kole looked to his left. Across the breach before the gate, Linn regarded him coolly, a faint smirk tugging the corner of her mouth.

“Finished tucking your sister in?”

“You know her,” Linn said, turning her attention to the trees. “She always has to make sure everyone’s in their place, from the elders right down to the fauns.”

“Somebody has to,” Kole said.

“I suppose.”

Kole nodded, but both kept their eyes locked on the shadows beneath the trees.

“See anything?”

“Everything,” Linn said as she scanned. “Which is to say, nothing.”

Two scamps were along in short order—boys not yet used to shaving the stubble that sprouted haphazardly along their chins. They carried a black cauldron stocked with flaming pitch between two poles, depositing it next to Linn. Beside it they placed a bundle of arrows whose ends had been wrapped in birch and sealed with wax.

Linn nodded her thanks without turning and the boys hopped off the archer’s platform, picking their way eagerly among the moss-covered stones that trickled toward the lakeshore.

Kole did not begrudge them their flight.

Something was off. His father had yet to return from his weeks-long ranging, and Kole was beginning to wonder if Tu’Ren’s fears were well placed. Kole trusted his gut, but he trusted Linn’s eyesight more. He watched her—she was still as stone—as often as he watched the shadows between the trunks of the trees.

The shouted orders of the First Keeper faded away, Tu’Ren’s voice going out in a wisp. Everyone was in position, and Kole rested a palm on his brazier, the heat flowing into him with a welcome shock that set his skin to steam in the drizzle. The other Embers along the wall were calm as mantises, with the archers and spear-wielders in between watchful and ready.

Kole caught a flash of movement to his left—Linn’s bow shifting in her hands fast as thought. She had a steely look, and Kole dropped his own bow from his shoulders and snatched a shaft from the pitch on his platform, lighting the end with a burst from his palm. He drew the string half-taught, feeling each feather slide along the grooves of his fingers.

He took it for a trick of the light at first. Here was a shadow that grew shallow before deepening once more, and there a flicker of jet black between a copse of trees.

“There.”

Kole looked as Linn rolled her shoulders back and drew.

At first, it looked like a great pack of worms, or a giant’s hand made only of rotted fingers, fat and questing. The tentacles reached out fast as centipedes, hissed in the ruddy torchlight and withdrew for a breath, drenching the trees in an inky stillness.

Usually it was a ‘They’ come bursting out of the forest—a roiling mass of spiked tails and barbed tongues lashing in the wavering light, leaping and slithering toward the walls. This time was different.

Now it was a singular thing—a mass of purple darkness, like a coil of snakes that move as one body. Its great arms ended in jagged claws, which raked earth, grass and stone with its passing. Roots cracked under its mass and the demon poured itself out from the trees, the horror lit by flickering torchlight.

Linn squinted against the torches at her periphery and let fly. Her aim was true and the shaft pierced the beast’s head, which shifted chaotically on impact, the mass of squealing serpents attacking the flaming arrow like an infection.

The beast roared throatily, and the wall hounds renewed their baying, iron will covering their nerves.

Tu’Ren took up the call, and Linn had already sunk two more burning shafts into the creature when Kole found his range. Other shafts arced up from the yard behind the gate, the wind of their passing teasing the hair on the nape of Kole’s neck. All along the wall, volleys flew, finding their mark and doing little to stop the demon’s momentum.

It was like a titan of nightmare, a god of the forest—a Night Lord from the World Apart, whose like had only been seen once before in the life of the Valley. That was a creature against which only Creyath Mit’Ahn, Ember of Hearth, had stood his ground, and Kole was not he.

Great forelegs curled into apelike fists, pounded the sloshing earth as bowed hind legs propelled it with lurching strides. And it headed right for the gate on which Kole and Linn stood.

“We need to steer it away,” Linn said, voice steady as she loosed another shaft. Her lips formed a tight line.

Kole dropped his bow and drew the Everwood blades from the sheath strapped across his back.

“Taei!” Kole yelled, and the other Ember turned to regard him from his own brazier further down the line. “We need Tu’Ren!”

“I think he’s occupied elsewhere,” Taei said. He was a matter-of-fact sort of fellow, and Kole was just now noticing the facts.

The din of pitched battle echoed on all sides as the Dark Kind they had expected issued forth like a frothing river. It started first on the right flank, where First Keeper Tu’Ren was stationed alongside Jenk. The hounds were already up and over the walls there, their quick strides leading the swarm on circular routes between wall and wood as the archers picked their marks.

On the left, Larren gave his own commands in his measured way, his spear tip glowing amber as he drained the fire from his brazier with the opposite palm. A pack of Dark Kind was already scrambling up the walls there, and the warriors around him dropped bows in favor of blades.

All around, men and women fought for every inch, throwing back the creatures with steel, flaming shaft and—in the case of a select few—Everwood blades burning bright as dawn, spraying their glowing arcs across the night.

Kole had never seen this many at once.

He sent his own sabers into a spin, feeling the familiar warmth coursing through his veins as he concentrated on the brazier that crackled beside him. Light flared and his blades ignited in a shower of sparks that had Linn cursing beside him as her latest shaft veered off the mark.

“Kole,” she said, drawing out his name in an uneasy warning as Dark Kind found their holds in the timbers of the gate and started their climb. The great black beast roared and beat its chest, the worms that were its skin charred and flaking around the burning arrows flecking its hide.

The beast came on again, and it was very close now.

“Kole!”

He left a smoking black stump where the first clawed arm reached up and over the carved timbers and whirled to face another.

There was a crash, and he was flying. And then he was falling.

His lungs expelled what air they held as he landed with a shock that sent pain lancing up his spine. Splinters—some the size of him—rained down around him as the gate exploded. Kole only realized he had lost one blade when a warrior scorched his gloved hand retrieving it from the debris. The man tossed it at Kole’s knees and nodded before being launched through the air by a black fist the size of a wagon.

Kole considered all of this through a haze, dimly aware of his surroundings, until he felt a burning slash across his cheek as a passing arrow cut him almost to the bone.

“Up!” Linn screamed from her perch, which leaned precariously over the wreckage of the gate. She already had a second arrow nocked, her eyes wide with uncommon fear.

The rush of pain renewed Kole’s heat, and he gripped his blades tighter, flaring them to life as he rose … and came face-to-face with the demon.

The writhing mass of undulating darkness crouched before him on bowed legs. It was half as tall as the gate it had brought down, and its eyes were the color of blood, deep and dark and staring—no, they were considering him. The eyes traced the contours of Kole’s face and then moved down, widening ever so slightly as it took in the glow of his living blades.

Kole’s broken brazier had spilled its guts into the shattered remnants of the gate. The beginnings of a bonfire started in the mud-caked pile, lighting the battle like daylight.

Linn had gone back to shooting as the Dark Kind made for the gap. Wall hounds and warriors alike clashed with the creatures, and Kole saw Jenk’s flaming sword and Kaya’s blazing staff flashing in the breach.

The Night Lord loomed over Kole, red eyes shifting like a hawk. And then its head tilted sickly, sharply, as if it heard something he could not. It might have been comical if it weren’t so horrifying.

For half a breath, he thought the demon might leave them alone. And then the look shifted, the recognition washed away in an instant as it roared and raised a great black fist.

Kole took his chance.

As the beast rose up to smash back down, Kole dove for its belly, plunging his blades in as he twisted and landed in the mud. Red-black blood that smelled of fresh rot poured out in steaming gouts, hissing around Kole’s burning blades as he withdrew and came up in a scramble.

A maddening roar was accompanied by a concussive blast to the chest and Kole was flying for the second time, only now he came up in a roll and weaponless.

Kole looked up to see the beast being harried on three sides by weapons of fire. Kaya slammed her staff into its hind leg with gusto, and Jenk slashed it on the opposite when it turned for her. Larren faced it down head-on, his spear glowing almost white hot, flames sprouting from its tip as it used the air itself for tinder.

The beast made Larren the object of its rage—a poor choice, as his spear made a hole in its neck, burning its life away in a single clash.

The creature fell to join its writhing fellows in the muck, twisting and squelching. It landed on its side with the force of a falling tree. As the rain washed away its corruption, turning the writhing snakes into pools of ink, Kole saw the red eyes fade and turn a pale blue.

He stood on shaking legs and stepped forward, joining the other Embers in a circle around the great, ape-like body as the battle raged around them. Above, Taei moved to intercept a Dark Kind that had Linn cornered on her perch. He cut it down in a sizzling spray.

“This one’s come a long way,” Larren said before moving toward the breach, Kaya following after.

Jenk looked down at the giant, brows drawn. He glanced at Kole, offering him a strange and unsettling look before reigniting his sword and rejoining the fray.

Despite the chaos, Kole lingered a moment longer, and then he, too, moved off to recover his blades, the gash on his cheek having already scabbed over.

The First Keeper’s orders echoed in the night, the hounds howled and the Ember blades flared and flashed. All was back to the way it was, but even as he fought into the pre-dawn hours, Kole could not shake the feeling that something else had been looking at him through the red.

A
s it turned out, Kole was feeling the effects of his row with the Night Lord keener than he had first thought. Ember blood had a way of masking minor concerns of the body until the fire ran its course. When it did, Kole collapsed.

Being carried on a litter back through the town he had helped to defend was not Kole’s idea of heroic. But then, nothing about the Dark Months was, not like the stories from the desert he and the other children had been told before bed each night.

His thoughts drifted as the sorry caravan wended its way down the lichen-choked steps, the wood homes on the outskirts giving way to older, sturdier stone in the basin. The structures here were squat and weathered, pressed into the side of the slope like the mussels clinging to the mud on the beach.

Kole strained and tilted his chin, attempting to raise his head, but a callused hand pressed it back down. First Keeper Tu’Ren walked beside him, his stern countenance augmented by a white mustache and beard.

“Lake’ll still be there when you’re at the bottom, son,” he said.

Kole struggled to speak through a cracked tongue and raw throat, so the other Ember leaned awkwardly as he walked.

“What losses?” Kole managed to whisper.

Tu’Ren shook his head, staring off into the distance. “Not what they could have been. More than they should have been.”

He looked down at Kole, his expression morphing.

“A fine thing you did.”

“Holspahr struck the fatal blow,” Kole said.

“True enough. Still, a fine thing. If you don’t know where to aim—

“Aim for the gut,” Kole finished weakly, and the First Keeper smirked.

Closer to the bottom, the path split, and Kole’s bearers turned him right and gave him a view of the lake. Even through the fading morning mist, it shined brightly, fishing boats bobbing, oddly content on their moorings.