My first and only lord, owner of my heart.
To which, in spite of herself, she responded the same.
Sixty-four
“Contest, action, the thrill of possession—these are the hallmarks of the game and the only reason one plays at all.”
–Attributed to the angiel Cephrael
Pelas arrived in the corridor in time to hear his brother shout a curse that indicated he was truly angry.
In the split-second echo following Shail’s roar, ghūls began rising.
Pelas knew of them from his time with Rafael in Shadow. Ghūls weren’t entities but approximations, amalgams of patterns given sentience through their intent.
A wave of them pounced on Shail.
His brother flooded the hall with deyjiin—irritably, almost indifferently, for he was focused on whatever new discovery was driving his fury—and the ghūls evaporated, only to slowly reassume form.
More concerning to Pelas than the ghūls was the problem of Shail. He admitted his younger brother was the last person he’d expected to run afoul of there.
Pelas pursued the idea of getting Tanis and the Eltanese out of the temple before Shail could notice them, but it was a miracle his brother hadn’t observed their presence already. Thus, Pelas’s priority became keeping Shail’s attention directed away from his companions.
He moved out of the shadows. “Come now, brother. Things can’t be that bad.”
Shail spun, roaring Pelas’s name, and a fiery column of unmaking blasted towards him—deyjiin and elae in negative polarity.
They called it starblight, and it was the kind of power they used to turn a star from a thermonuclear plasma into a mottled black hunk of ore. Pelas only just got up his shield in time.
In retrospect, he probably should have summoned a shield before alerting his brother to his presence.
The blast propelled Pelas backwards. He flew over the edge of the precipice where the hallway bent in half and plummeted into darkness.
He halted his fall in midair and hung there, upside down, breathing hard, safely out of range of the furnace of flames that continued raging on for some minutes above him. He let his racing heart find its rhythm again while he thanked all the gods in the known that he hadn’t been one second longer in summoning his shield—or that would’ve been the end of this shell.
He’d never seen his brother so angry. Whatever Ean and Rafael were doing to upset Shail’s equilibrium, it appeared to be working.
Tanis... He reached out to the lad while righting himself. Shail is here. Get out of there. Don’t wait for me.
He felt Tanis’s dismay. Um...there might be a slight problem with that, and the lad shared what he was seeing.
Whereupon Pelas growled a curse beside which his brother’s recent obscenity paled.
***
Tanis and the Eltanese were being pursued, and not in a good way.
The shadows in the temple had never seemed friendly, but now they were rather voraciously trying to murder them. They resonated a high-pitched, inhuman keen while screaming around their shields in an insatiable whirlwind of malice.
Tanis and the Eltanese had banded close together, their shields overlapping. Separation would mean instantly losing sight of each other in the madly churning darkness. Their weapons passed right through the attacking shadows, proving them insubstantial, but instinct warned that letting these things touch their unprotected flesh would be a bad idea.
“Criim, what are these things?” Mat swung his blade again, slicing dark eels.
Jude was holding his blade before himself warily. “I get the idea they’re not super pleased to see us.”
“Really, Jude? What gave you that impression?”
They never knew how one of the things got inside Mat’s shield in that moment, but it adhered instantly to his left arm and formed a thick blanket of glistening tar.
Mat staggered, shouted a curse, tried to rip the thing off him. His shield started flickering, allowing more of them to dart in at him.
In a breath of disbelief, glistening tar covered him from head to toe.
“Unholy Criim—get them off meeeee!”
Mat tried pulling at them, even scraping them off with his blade, but even Merdanti couldn’t deter them.
“Jude—go help him!” Gadovan widened his shield to protect all of them, and Jude rushed to assist Mat, who was shouting curses.
That is, until a shadow whispered into his mouth and solidified into a gag of tar. Then it was just muffled screams that echoed frantically in their thoughts as Mat wrestled impotently to extricate himself.
Jude tried using elae on the shadows, but the lifeforce just bounced off them. Mat was starting to turn pale.
This was the focus of Tanis’s horrified gaze when Pelas contacted him.
As soon as he gleaned from Pelas’s thoughts what the creatures were—or rather, weren’t—Tanis understood better how to deal with them.
He pulled his Merdanti dagger, set the blade against the tar clinging to Mat’s face and bound the shadow with the fourth. This magnetized the fourth-strand patterns that comprised the ghūl to his own fourth-strand binding.
Then he ripped the ghūl off of Mat.
It whirled around and came right back at Tanis, but he’d seen the core of patterns glowing at the base of its head by that point, and he drove his Merdanti blade—which nullified all enchantments—into the matrix. The ghūl evaporated.
“Bind it with the fourth!” Tanis shouted to Jude, even as repeated the process with the next shadow clinging to Mat. “Aim below the head area—there’s a matrix of patterns there!”
Tanis bound and ripped off the next shadow and stabbed his dagger into it before those tarry arms could attach to him.
Jude soon got the hang of it, and working together, they freed Mat.
He folded over and pushed hands on his knees, heaving in great gulps of air. Jude rejoined Gadovan in holding their shield in place—the captain’s working was all that was keeping the storm of other ghūls off of them.
Gadovan spared a tense glance for Tanis. “Lad, how did you know what to do?”
“Pelas says they’re called ghūls.” Tanis placed a hand on Mat’s shoulder. The knight was still bent over with his hands braced on his thighs, his face white. Tanis established a tentative rapport and assessed with a Healer’s eyes to be sure Mat’s life pattern was unharmed. He flowed elae into him, just for good measure. “They’re not living,” he told the others meanwhile. “They’re sentient patterns invested with purpose.”
“What purpose? Getting rid of us?” Mat choked out.
“More or less. They don’t become solid until they latch on.”
“Important safety tip,” Jude noted. “Don’t let them latch onto you. Thanks for testing that theory for us, Mat.”
“What’s powering them?” Tension threaded Gadovan’s tone. “If they’re just patterns, something has to be giving them force and impetus. They can’t just be self-generating.”
“Whatever’s doing it, the bloody things were suffocating me.” Mat looked truly shaken and still hadn’t found his breath. “I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. It was like I was being...remade.”
“How do we fight these things, Tanis?” Gadovan was clearly straining beneath the effort of keeping them all off.
Tanis released Mat and looked uneasily around at the storm. “Our Merdanti blades will disrupt the patterns’ cohesion. Aim for the back of their necks. That appears to be where the matrix is concentrated.”
All around him, malevolent darkness whirled.
To top everything else, Tanis was starting to get that unbalanced feeling again. It never seemed to come at an opportune moment, when he might’ve just sat down for a spell and taken one of his lady’s tonics to settle his stomach.
Mat straightened and summoned his shield anew, then joined Gad’s side. Gadovan gave him an encouraging look.
They were entirely surrounded in seething darkness. The only light
came from the glowing dome of their shields.
Tanis really hated to be the one to add insult to injury, but...
He tugged uncomfortably at one ear. “You...should probably also know that Pelas’s brother is here.”
“The one we like, or the one we don’t like?” Jude shoved the roiling darkness back again with a grunt of effort.
“Definitely the one we don’t like.”
“Bad things come in threes,” Mat grumbled.
“Pelas wants us to move onto the weld where we’ll be safer.”
Gadovan winced beneath a particularly heavy storm of the creatures battering his shield. “A capital idea, if only we could reach it.”
The seething mass of ghūls stood between them and escape. Surprisingly, no one was overly keen to forge into that darkness.
Tanis couldn’t understand the sentient patterns’ purpose. They were radiating an intention somewhere between get out! and annihilate! but they weren’t letting them get to the weld to leave.
He supposed that was the drawback to using sentient patterns as sentinels. You could invest them with purpose, but you couldn’t make them rational.
Gadovan leveled a resolute look across all of them. “Now that we know how to deal with these things, I think we’re going to have to do it the hard way.”
“Criim, Gad,” Mat protested. “Why can’t we ever do it the easy way?”
Gadovan flashed a tight smile. “Nothing worth having ever comes cheap.”
“Capital.” Jude sighed.
Mathias grumbled, “You know, I quite like living. Being alive suits my complexion more than being dead.”
“Then don’t die,” Jude said reasonably.
“Easy for you to say, He Who Wasn’t Just Nearly Suffocated Three Minutes Ago.”
Jude gave him a grin that was all teeth. “But now you’re smarter.”
“The Time Fathers willing.” Gadovan looked around at them resolutely. “On three, armor on, shields to yourselves, daggers out. Keep them off Tanis and make for the weld. Ready, lad?”
Tanis lifted his dagger with a queasy as-I’ll-ever-be look. In truth, he would’ve rather faced the ghūls than suffer his tempestuous stomach, which was twisting itself into knots waiting for the uneven floor to flatten out again. It felt like rubbing salt in the wound to have to face the ghūls while his stomach was turning somersaults on him.
“Three, two, one—”
A force barreled into Tanis.
He flew out of the mass of ghūls and landed hard on the weld with an explosive exhale—
Where an ethereal hand grabbed his ankle and yanked him onto the Pattern of the World.
Only, they clearly weren’t on the pattern. Judging from the filtered half-light they fell into, they had to be between ley lines.
Tanis instinctively threw an anchor into the weld before they got too far away to find it again—whatever force had him was carting him from ley line to ley line like a sack on the end of a rope.
The line on his anchor quickly pulled taut, which in turn hauled up on whatever or whoever was trying to cart him away. For a moment, Tanis felt stretched between forces, himself holding to his own anchor while someone else was trying to drag him free of it.
But his anchor held, and the man—if it was a man—had to release him.
Tanis swung free.
Had he been just another Nodefinder, the lad might’ve been lost in that moment, for most Nodefinders only knew how to travel on the Pattern. But Tanis had spent the last several weeks dredging ley lines through T’khendar’s world grid. He recognized the oddly filtered light and magnetic resonance that made the air shimmer with refraction. He knew where the other had taken him.
Tanis could’ve hauled himself back onto the Pattern itself then, but the thing was...
When the man had ripped him through the weld and away, the seas of Balance had calmed.
So Tanis kept a firm hold on his anchor—he didn’t want to fall off the grid altogether, which would be disastrous—but he also magnetized himself to the nearest leis, like throwing a hook to catch against a higher cliff, and hovered there between his two mental anchors, waiting.
Traversing the aether of the world grid was a bit like wandering through luminous fog. You could see, but there wasn’t much to see. While on T’khendar’s grid, he and the Eltanese had communicated through the fourth-strand bond they’d established, because the distances between ley lines were too great and the refraction too disorienting to spot each other visually.
Only now, a man was very definitely descending towards Tanis.
He lowered slowly into view out of the pearlescent fog, much the dangling spider coming to inspect its catch. The man was using some kind of magnetic anchor, similar to but different than Tanis’s.
When he drew level with Tanis, the Vestian’s grey eyes were dark with mischief. “Clever boy.”
Tanis clutched tight to his anchors and tried to figure out what Balance was trying to tell him about the Vestian. “Whatever you were doing in that temple...our business needn’t trouble yours.”
“Oh, I think it does.” The Vestian lifted his other arm and swung to a new anchor, agile as an ape moving from limb to limb.
He was using about a dozen patterns all at once to do what he was doing—Tanis saw them all in a painful flash as the Vestian grabbed the next leis—but the woof and warp of the patterns were woven so tightly with each other that the lad couldn’t easily separate them into their component actions.
Hauling up beneath the metaphoric branch, the Vestian hung by one hand, smiling darkly at him. “My employer is keen to converse with you.”
“Converse.” If the Vestian worked for Shail, and it seemed apparent that he did, then conversing would be the least of Shail’s interest in him.
The Vestian grinned. “He seemed fairly irritated to see the artist, your patron...or is he your paramour?”
Tanis held the Vestian’s gaze. “He’s Shailabanáchtran’s brother,” he replied tightly, “and you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“Don’t I?” The Vestian linked himself back to the earlier leis so he hung not quite spread-eagle beneath his anchors, holding to two magnetic lines. Tanis was doing the same thing, but with mental hands instead of his actual ones. He had no idea how the Vestian was doing what he was doing.
The man curled in his knees and swung himself up onto a sort of branch above him—a leis, Tanis assumed, or a similarly magnetic strand of this web the other seemed so familiar with—and sat there, grinning at Tanis. He pulled out a small dagger—not Merdanti, but very definitely ensorcelled—and began toying with it.
“Fhorgs talk. Especially the Fhorgs serving Isahl—I’m guessing that’s your Shail-whatever-the-fethe his name is.” He made a twirling motion with the dagger. “The Fhorgs talk a lot about a man named Pelas, who is no man by any account, and how Isahl hates him so vehemently that he would quench the sun if it meant ridding himself of his meddling.”
Realizing that he couldn’t isolate the patterns the Vestian was using, Tanis concentrated on trying to duplicate them.
“I missed the part where this has anything to do with me,” the lad said.
The Vestian angled him a wry look. “I didn’t play you for a fool. Don’t play me for one.”
Tanis shook his head. “Only one of us is working for Shailabanáchtran. That rather objectively decides the issue.”
The Vestian chuckled. He waggled his dagger at him again. “I like you, lad. You’ve got some balls on you for being what...barely ten and eight? So I’ll give you the chance to do this the easy way.” He swirled his dagger to indicate the aether around Tanis. “Release your anchor, we go together to see my employer, my part is done and the rest lies between you and your gods.”
Tanis had about half of the Vestian’s patterns committed to memory.
“That doesn’t sound like such a great deal for me.” He arched brows over a wary stare. “Shail wants my blood as much as he wan
ts his brother’s.”
The Vestian grinned again, and there was not a little admiration behind his gaze. “Must be quite the story. So...” he cocked his head to the side, “you’re opting for the hard way, then?”
“Looks like it.”
“Outstanding.”
In the same instant that the Vestian threw his dagger and severed Tanis’s anchor, Tanis saw a pattern flash and realized it wasn’t a real dagger at all—
Even as he was falling-swinging towards his second anchor—
Just as the Vestian was launching through the aether to snare him.
Tanis uttered a prayer and stacked the patterns he’d gleaned off the Vestian into a matrix bound to his intent...
And saw a webwork of ley lines appear all around him.
Startled but happily so, he magnetized to the nearest line and dropped beneath the Vestian, just as the man was soaring past. His gloved fingers slid through Tanis’s flying hair, snagging empty air and maybe a few loose strands.
Tanis would trade some hair to keep his head free of Shail’s noose any day.
He cast another anchor towards the weld, but the Vestian only severed it again. That same knife pattern flashed.
Still falling, Tanis flung out his hands and tried to catch the leis he’d magnetized to, the way the Vestian was doing, but his hands slid right through the line. He used the second strand to haul himself to a stop then, far below the leis. His body jerked to a very undignified halt.
The lad’s heart was racing, his mind awhirl with new perceptions. Some instinctive part of him was making connections faster than he could analyze them. He didn’t have all of the patterns the Vestian was using, but now that he could see the ley lines, he could at least maneuver around on them.
It was like being inside a gigantic three-dimensional web. Leis zigzagged every which way, creating a dense mesh between the thicker ley lines that must’ve belonged to nodes. The Vestian was somehow making these magnetic lines solid to his perception. That meant he must’ve been using the fifth.
Tanis needed that pattern if he had any hope of getting the better of the man.
Far above Tanis, the Vestian had spotted him and was angling down now towards his location.
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