Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3)

by Melissa McPhail

  Valentina sank onto the edge of her desk. “The Alorin Seat is convinced my great-uncle is behind these deaths.”

  Marius gave her a telling look by way of agreement.

  “I’m not certain the truth is so simple,” she remarked with a little frown, the barest narrowing of her brows. “The absent witness is conveniently blamed.”

  Marius knew better than to voice his opinion on this topic; experience had proven that any discussion involving Björn van Gelderan would open an argument he could never win.

  Valentina shook her head and then gazed at him for a long moment of silence. “I fear illusions of hope, Marius. The realm is dying, and our race dies with it.”

  Exhaling forcefully, Marius pushed off the bed and took up his long crimson coat as he walked to her. Fully dressed, he posed a striking form. He placed hands upon her silk-clad shoulders and gazed into his Empress’s eyes. “Whoever is behind these deaths and disappearances, the Order shall uncover them, as well as their motives. I head now to the Sormitáge.”

  She ran fingers across his cheek and then through his dark hair. “You go to study the currents?”

  “I go to the Archives. Perhaps our ancestors can teach us something of this threat.”

  She eyed him speculatively. “And there is the other matter hanging upon your conscience.”

  He grimaced—for she knew his mind too well. “Admittedly, I would also know what the Endoge has discovered about the Adepts gone missing from the Sormitáge. The Order has found no trace of Malin van Drexel or any of the others.”

  “Which may indicate there is nothing to find. The Sormitáge produces more dropouts than graduates, long an effective means of winnowing the gold from the dross.”

  Marius regarded her with a frown. His gut told him the three missing Adepts played some role in a larger conflict, but these days his Empress required proof before action was taken, and he had none to give her. “Valentina—”

  She leaned in with a kiss, capturing him as ever with the simplest of means. Pulling away, she looked up into his eyes. “Go then, and bring back the truth of things.”

  Marius bowed in gratitude for her parting kiss, which was all the apology either of them ever needed.

  The High Lord exited the imperial apartments beneath a marble archway sculpted in a rendering of the Lady of the Rivers reaching to embrace the Lord of the Forest, one of the oldest and most enduring legends of the Agasi culture. The four Praetorians on guard slammed vambraces across their breastplates in salute as he passed.

  Beyond the impressive threshold, Marius’s own men waited in an antechamber, lounging among a collection of low couches. Seeing him, they dropped their cards on a table and leapt to their feet.

  “Buona sera, Signore di L’Arlesé!” greeted the shorter of the pair, a truthreader named Giancarlo. He flashed a toothy grin, bright against his olive complexion.

  “Giancarlo, Vincenzé,” Marius returned. “Walk with me.”

  They jumped into step with him as he headed swiftly down the corridor. “Dove, High Lord?” asked Vincenzé, Giancarlo’s taller, leaner Adept cousin. His blue eyes gleamed with curiosity as he waited for the High Lord’s reply.

  Marius eyed the both of them askance. “To the Sormitáge.”

  Giancarlo whacked his cousin on the arm and then presented his palm, waggling his fingers expectantly. “Pay the piper, mio fratello con il cervello di topo.” My brother with the brain of a mouse. Giancarlo’s Calabrian accent fell heavier than his cousin’s, though both had been raised within an hour’s ride of each other’s homes.

  Vincenzé dug two silver coins out of his pocket and slammed them into his cousin’s open palm. Marius was used to their constant wagering—the two of them bet on anything and everything conceivable to man—but they were unquestionably loyal and deviously inventive, and Marius depended on them for all manner of assignments.

  “Che cosa avete sentito?” What have you heard? the High Lord asked. Though he read all of the reports from Agasan’s unparalleled spy network, the Order of the Glass Sword, he trusted first what he saw with his own eyes, either in the flesh or upon the currents. Next, he trusted Vincenzé and Giancarlo.

  Come to think of it…he might list quite a few additional others that he trusted before he trusted the Order. This didn’t mean their information was incorrect, but spies ever had their own agendas, and Giuseppe di Creppo, the Order’s Grand Master, stood as no exception.

  “Loudest upon the tides of rumor, High Lord,” Vincenzé replied, keeping his voice low even though they spoke in their private dialect, “is talk of the boy Malin van Drexel, the latest Adept vanished from the Sormitáge.”

  Yes, he is heavy in my thoughts as well.

  It wasn’t unheard-of for an older boy to abandon his studies and flee the university—often with a girl in tow—or to expatriate to Jamaii or the Akkad to seek wilder fortunes, but three boys in fewer moons was too many for coincidence.

  The High Lord shook his head at their own failure to uncover the perpetrator thus far. “Suppositions?”

  “Oh, most everything is floating around.” Vincenzé rested a hand on his sword hilt as they walked. “The students claim malfeasance on the part of various docents—clearly ill attempts to exact some personal vendetta—while talk among the literatos and maestros is that the boy ran away. The administrative staff whisper a dozen different theories, each more wildly variant and unlikely than the last.”

  “And the family?”

  Vincenzé exchanged a look with his cousin, who replied, “The family is rattling sabers at the Fifth Vestal, High Lord, demanding he return their son unharmed or else appear before them and declare his innocence.”

  “Che mi tocca sentire,” Vincenzé touched a hand to his temple and then threw it into the air incredulously. “As if the Vestal need speak nothing to the Empress of the wars, yet they expect he will appear before them to address allegations of kidnapping?”

  “The vain hope of a grieving family,” Marius murmured by way of agreement. There was nothing else to be gleaned from such hearsay, so he moved on. “What other news?”

  “Giancarlo lost his shirt dicing with a pair of gypsies,” snorted Vincenzé. His blue eyes sparkled with mirth.

  “Hey stronzo,” Giancarlo smiled daggers back at him, “my balls have a little itch.” He pointed to his crotch. “Come do your duty. I know you enjoy it.”

  “What’s the latest among the Guard?” Marius prodded.

  “Complaints about the weather,” Giancarlo offered. He grabbed his crotch and made kissing sounds towards his cousin.

  “And the food.” Vincenzé clapped his hand on his forearm and waggled his hand, an oblique reference to the length of his shaft and Giancarlo’s taking it in the arse.

  “And the officers,” Giancarlo added in answer to the High Lord while simultaneously thumbing his teeth at his cousin.

  “And the ale.” Vincenzé shot Giancarlo a predatory grin.

  Giancarlo’s look was withering. “And the lack of suitably amenable women.”

  “Don’t you mean malleable?” smirked Vincenzé.

  “That too. Then there’s the usual mutterings about duty assignments.”

  “And respectable pay.”

  “Or rather, the lack thereof,” Giancarlo corrected.

  “Lots of talk about the Danes and whether they mean to revolt again,” Vincenzé said.

  Marius had expected this. The Red Guard always worried about the Danes.

  “And recently there’s been some chatter about a disaster in the east, some kind of temple destroyed in Rethynnea.”

  “I heard it was Thessalonia,” Giancarlo said.

  “No, it was Rethynnea.”

  “The Temple of the Vestals,” Marius meanwhile supplied in answer, having learned of its destruction from the Order many weeks ago.

  “Esattamente.” Vincenzé shot his cousin a triumphant look. “In Rethynnea.”

  “Nothing else, then?” Marius asked.


  “No, High Lord. It’s been remarkably quiet.”

  If it’s quiet, it’s a dangerous kind of silence.

  All of Marius’s senses shouted that the realm was tipping towards disaster. The unexplained taint upon the currents indicated some impending ill, but no matter how clearly he recognized the danger, he had no understanding of what he saw and no way of acting upon it. He felt a stallion thrice bound to its stall, unable to move in any direction save backwards into the wall.

  “You will tell me if anything else comes to your ears,” the High Lord murmured.

  “Naturalmente,” Vincenzé said with a flourish of his hand that was almost a salute.

  The Sacred City of Faroqhar hosted two kinds of nodes: the kind that were twisted, and the kind that were bound into soglia-varcarés, often shortened to soglia’res—gateways that anyone could use.

  One such soglia’re dominated the center of the Imperial Palace’s Piazza di Sacro Cuore della Verità, so named because legend claimed it was the spot upon which the blessed angiel Epiphany had been birthed into the realm.

  Reaching the piazza, Marius called the fifth to fend off the lashing rain and headed to the marble rotunda dominating the plaza’s center.

  He and his Calabrians had made the soglia’re crossing so many times that they no longer noticed the blur of disorientation as they trod upon the very pattern of the world to move from the palace to the Sormitáge campus, several miles distant. Certainly as they emerged at the other end, the winds thrashed the Sormitáge’s limestone forecourt just as fiercely as they’d been striking the palace’s.

  Still draped in the fifth, the High Lord di L'Arlesé approached the Sormitáge’s grand edifice with Giancarlo and Vincenzé close on his heels. Several groups of students hung about beneath the mammoth portico that formed the building’s façade, some gazing dispiritedly into the rain, others chatting or smoking the pungent leaf that the students seemed to favor.

  Two adolescent truthreaders were practicing their craft on one another as Marius began his ascent of the fifty long stairs leading up to the entrance. When they saw him, however, they quickly turned shoulder to shoulder and bowed. Surprise rippled through the rest of the students then, such that whispers of the High Lord’s arrival preceded him into the building.

  By the time Marius and his men entered the main hall, an administrative line was gathering in a hasty display of rustling robes, with the willowy, violet-doused Endoge at its crowning head. “High Lord di L'Arlesé.” The Endoge greeted him with a stately bow. “You honor us. I’m shamed to say I knew not of your intended visit, but be assured—”

  “I mean only to study in the Archives, Liam.”

  “Of course.” The ever-composed Endoge held a hand toward the Sormitáge’s Grande Passáge while his colorless truthreader’s eyes watched Marius with a shrewd intelligence. “Allow me to escort you, High Lord?”

  “Your guidance is welcome.”

  The Endoge made a formal and elegant nod of acquiescence and led away with his hands clasped before him.

  Marius looked to Vincenzé and murmured, “See what you can learn.”

  The two Calabrians bowed and slipped away to their own investigations.

  The Sormitáge’s Grand Passáge arched six stories and boasted some of the realm’s most spectacular sculpture and art. The paintings on the walls and immense ceiling told the story of Alorin’s genesis as recounted in the Sobra I’ternin, as well as gave a history of five millennia of kings and emperors. At a quarter of a mile in length, and painted by the hands of master artists over many decades, it stood as the greatest work of artistic endeavor the realm had ever witnessed.

  Domes crowned each junction where new passages branched to other parts of the university’s vast main building, and each dome’s frescos depicted a different legend. Some claimed the entire mythology of Alorin might be understood from a detailed study of the domes of the Grand Passáge.

  As the High Lord and the Endoge made their way down the corridor, literatos and other faculty stepped aside with low bows, while docents held back whispering students to leave a wide path free for the High Lord’s procession.

  They were walking beneath vivid scenes from the Creation when Marius said to the Endoge, “Since I’m here, Liam, what student progress is worthy of note?”

  “All are in keeping with expectations, Your Grace, but we’ve seen some impressive achievements from among the Catenaré ranks this term.”

  “How many are expected to finish?”

  “One hundred and forty-two have been invited to Invocation Trials, which begin in a few days.”

  “And how many among the recent Devoverés have demonstrated an aptitude for Patterning?” As a wielder himself, Marius strongly supported screening all Adepts for an aptitude in the craft, though it pained him how rare it was to find any with both aptitude and interest. Rarer still were those who could learn to work patterns of the fifth with any regularity. In fifty years, he could count them all on his own hands.

  “Over thirty Devoveré have submitted requests to advance their study across the strands. One I might call to your attention, High Lord, is the eldest of the Mavellias boys, a Nodefinder.”

  Marius pepped up. “Has he shown an interest in pursuing the Art?”

  “He’s shown great interest in pursuing the Healer Penelope van der Meer,” the Endoge offered sourly. “And before her, I believe it was the truthreader Mariana d’Ancarré, eldest daughter of the Veneisean Ambassador.”

  “I see.”

  “Maestro van Reinlein, the young man’s sponsor, is speaking to him about his shameful dilettantism.”

  “Let’s hope the maestro’s lecture takes root. By Epiphany’s light, if Malachai’s scourge had beset us in this age instead of three centuries ago, he’d have wiped us from the realm.”

  The Endoge arched a rueful brow by way of acknowledgment of this truth. “I share your concerns, High Lord. Despite all efforts, our numbers decline every year.”

  Passing beneath a dome whose frescoes told the story of the birth of the Lady of the Rivers, they turned off the Grand Passáge and headed down a staircase and outside beneath a cloister being bombarded by rain. Their clothes were damp when the Endoge led them back inside and up another staircase.

  Marius noted the Endoge’s pale hand as it traced the line of the marble balustrade. The truthreader wore three Sormitáge rings on his fourth finger, and the pale gold gleamed brightly in the dim stairwell. A stack of three was a remarkable accomplishment for an Adept of any strand, yet not an unexpected standard for the Sormitáge’s chief administrator.

  Marius exhaled a slow sigh. How few they were, those who’d survived the Adept Wars, and how dire their race’s future appeared to him. That someone—or several someones—seemed intent on finishing Malachai’s work and exterminating the last of them only rubbed salt in the wound.

  Marius pushed a hand through his hair and sent a sideways look at the Endoge. “Any progress on locating your most recent missing Adept, Liam?”

  The Endoge cast him a reticent eye. “Regrettably no, Your Grace. The boy seems to have completely vanished—I believe your own Order found no more than the regiment captain did.”

  “I heard as much, yes.”

  “I daresay, the lack of evidence implies some form of arcane malfeasance, yet if elae was somehow involved in the act, the currents showed none of it.” Liam glanced uncertainly at him. “Malin van Drexel had his Maritus bracelet. He could not have left the grounds without being traced by the wards. It is most perplexing—we should’ve found some sign of him.”

  Marius thought of the taint he’d been seeing on the currents and wondered with a surge of unease if those scars might conceal such dark deeds as forcefully removing a student through the wards.

  The Endoge continued meanwhile, “I confess, the idea of elae being put to despicable use within our pristine halls…I cannot sleep at night for the horror of it.”

  Marius cast the Endoge a look of agreemen
t.

  At last they reached a pair of towering double doors framed within five recessive marble arches, and the Endoge came to a halt. “On my desk I have the regiment captain’s complete written report on Malin van Drexel, which I would be most obliged to share with Your Grace once your study in the Archives is concluded.”

  “Thank you, Liam. I’m interested in seeing what avenues were followed in the captain’s investigation.”

  “I await your calling.” The Endoge bowed and departed.

  For a moment, Marius watched him making his way back down the hall. Then the High Lord di L'Arlesé sent the fifth into the doors and entered the Imperial Archives to see what history could teach him.

  Seven

  “The darkness at the end is that of the beginning; thus are life and death of equal value.”

  – The Book of Bethamin

  Darshanvenkhátraman stood on the tower’s crenellated roof gazing north as the wind whipped and swirled around him. The air tasted of earth, and heat, and carried upon it the peculiar tang of static that felt such a balm to his troubled mind. A storm was coming. In the east, turbulent clouds clashed in variegated mounds, lightning flashing in their depths, while a broad swath of rainstorm shadowed the lower horizon.

  Saldaria. Tambarré. That liminal place between desert and northern forest birthed fierce storms. Lightning commonly struck the land while its mother storm swept above, marking her path of passing with sand melted into curling spires of glass. And when the tempestuous wind drove the desert into the sky, mud rained down upon the Prophet’s temple.

  Storms called to Darshan, though it was his brother Shailabanáchtran whose name meant Maker of Storms. He and his brothers had been birthed among a contentious clashing of elements that charged space with power; their nascent forms had been swaddled in voluminous clouds of electrified dust that refracted starlight into colors inconceivable by mortal eyes. Though the worst storms of this realm were calm by comparison, they yet harbored some quieter harmonic of the chaos out of which the Malorin’athgul were birthed, and to which Darshan would return when their work was done, when all that was left of Alorin was a similar elemental storm.