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

by Melissa McPhail

  Captain di Alema snapped to attention. “Your Grace. Thank you for coming.” A tall, dark-haired officer with blue eyes and a knife scar across his bearded chin, di Alema and Marius had battled countless threats together.

  Marius turned him a look that spoke volumes. “You were right to call me, Captain. What—?”

  But the question again froze on his tongue, for the prisoner just then started murmuring a rapid deluge of nonsense. The man appeared insane, shaking his drooping head from side to side.

  The High Lord looked back to di Alema. “What language does he mutter?”

  The captain shrugged. “We hoped you might know it, Your Grace.”

  Frowning, Marius moved to observe the prisoner more closely. Sanctos Spirito but what a grotesque specimen of inhumanity!

  Bald and emaciated, the prisoner emitted a foul odor that made the filth of urine, feces, and unwashed men enjoyable by comparison. Huge patches of blistered flesh mottled his otherwise ebon-black body, while yellowish fluid oozed from fetid and charred cracks where natural skin and corrupted flesh met.

  Di Alema noted Marius studying the man. “We thought they were burns, Your Grace, but—”

  “No.” Marius turned him a sharp look. “Not burns.” He pulled a black-bladed dagger from his belt and pointed with it, careful to keep it out of the mumbling prisoner’s reach. “Where the blackened skin touches pure flesh, the joinings are necrotic. Two forces are at work upon this man—opposing magics, if I’m not mistaken.” He gave the captain a look of deepest concern. “This is Patterning at it most malfeasant.”

  “Shala…bana…” mumbled the prisoner, his head hung low. “Shalabaaaaaah… shalabaaa-na...” Abruptly he raised his head and shrieked, “Shalabanaaaaaaaah!”

  Marius tensed, cringing.

  “I don’t—” di Alema began.

  Suddenly the prisoner threw back his head and sucked in a raw gasp. His eyes fixed unerringly on Marius.

  The High Lord took a reflexive step backwards.

  The man’s eyes were appalling. The vessels of the left orb were so ruptured that it appeared a pale blue iris in a sea of blood, while the prisoner’s right eye was the purest black from corner to corner.

  The guards behind them cursed and di Alema hissed for order, but Marius stood rooted.

  Dear Epiphany, what has been done to this man?

  “Shalabaaaaaaah!” the prisoner screamed. His one remaining eye bulged alarmingly.

  Suddenly he sprang for the High Lord, straining to the ends of his chains, teeth gnashing and fingers as claws. A litany of spitting and feral snarls erupted from the depths of his chest, and despite his wasted condition, the thick chains looked like they might not be heavy enough to contain him.

  Marius stared.

  “That’s why we have him chained, Your Grace,” di Alema muttered. He gazed in dismay upon the snarling creature who was clearly a man no longer. “He’s…it’s… deceptively strong.”

  Eyeing the chains uncertainly, Marius worked the fifth into them until he was sure that the man would need the strength of ten horses to break them. Even so, he moved a few paces back. Di Alema joined his side.

  “I would know everything you know, Captain,” Marius muttered without removing his gaze from the gnashing prisoner.

  Di Alema swallowed. “We found him wandering in the palace, High Lord.”

  Marius turned to him sharply. “In the palace? Where?”

  “Outside the Hall of Rivers. As soon as the patrol called out to him, he turned…like this,” and he indicated the frenzied, shrieking caricature of what had once been a man. “It took the entire patrol of six to subdue him and bring him here.”

  “Shhhhhhaaaaaaaaal!” yowled the prisoner in a high shriek, making di Alema flinch. And then, just as suddenly, his shrieking ceased. The silence, by comparison, was almost more startling.

  The prisoner peered at Marius first with one eye and then the other, finally angling his head so that the black eye remained with its malignant gaze pinned on the High Lord.

  In that moment, Marius became certain that someone else was watching.

  He threw a net of the fourth over everyone in the room, protecting their thoughts, and the creature screamed again, this time with a decided undertone of fury.

  “This being is not himself,” the High Lord murmured. He held his pattern firmly in place while his unease compounded.

  The prisoner started snarling what could only be curses from the stench of their tone. He bounded against his chains, snapping and biting, both eyes now open and fixed demonically upon Marius, emitting that guttural growl—

  Then he simply slumped back against the wall, unconscious. The entire display was like a grotesque wind-up toy seemingly exhausted of its turn.

  Silence filled the room.

  “What…what happened, Your Grace?” Di Alema looked quickly from the prisoner to Marius.

  “His thoughts were vile,” came an unmistakable voice from behind them.

  Marius turned to find the Empress standing in the portal.

  Di Alema and his men instantly fell to one knee, pressed fists to the floor and bowed their heads.

  “Rise, Captain.” The Empress flowed into the room with her Praetorians in a silver halo around her. Marius exhaled a bit of the tension that had bound him, unexpectedly grateful for the reassurance of their presence. Valentina touched Marius upon the shoulder as she passed, a brief but loving greeting, and then walked to within arm’s reach of the prisoner.

  “Aurelia—” di Alema urged in warning, but Marius’s swift look silenced him.

  “Fear not, Captain,” the Empress murmured without turning from her inspection of the prisoner. “I have his mind in thrall.” As she reached to take the man’s blackened chin in hand, three thin bands of gold gleamed upon her fourth finger, as well as two around her thumb. The Empress’s skill with the fourth strand was such that she need but lay eyes upon a man to know or compel his thoughts; and there were few Healers in the realm more skilled, though the first was not her native strand.

  Valentina lifted the prisoner’s head with one hand and used her other thumb to pry back the lids of his eyes, studying each. Marius felt di Alema flinch beside him and knew only sympathy for the man. The workings of elae could be glorious when used toward constructive ends but utterly foul when crafted by a mind twisted with rank hungers.

  The Empress placed her palm upon the prisoner’s blackened forehead and concentrated, and there followed naught but the tense silence of alert men breathing and watching…waiting.

  Finally, she released the prisoner and stepped back from him. Her gaze moved from one chained hand to the next, studying each. After a moment, she chose his right hand and took it up for closer inspection. “Come, see.”

  Marius joined her side and looked down at the man’s hand. The Empress’s slender fingers appeared as pristine as white marble against the prisoner’s rotting flesh, which was as blistered and blackened as a spitted boar roasted too close to the flames. Marius couldn’t help but wish she might exhibit some measure of caution. Who knew what rancorous corruption was at work upon the man?

  Resting the prisoner’s tortured hand on her palm, the Empress pointed to a thin cylindrical bulge beneath the flesh of his first finger, just above the knuckle.

  “What is that?” Di Alema asked, peering closer.

  The Empress’s eyes were as hard as the diamonds they so resembled. “I will tell you what it is, Captain. It’s a Sormitáge ring.”

  Marius recoiled. “Who was he?”

  “His name is gone even from his own mind,” the Empress replied gravely. “But he was once a Nodefinder.”

  “Four bloody rivers!” Di Alema hissed. Then he remembered the company he was in and hastened to add, “Your pardon, Aurelia.”

  “An entirely appropriate declaration, Captain.” The Empress released the prisoner’s hand and shook her head, her brow furrowed deeply. “So do we witness the iniquity of mor’alir at its most contemptib
le.” She turned to face di Alema in a swirl of velvet and silk. “Keep him under constant watch and alert me when he wakes.”

  Di Alema looked hesitant. “Aurelia…forgive me—may I ask one question?”

  She gave him an inquiring look.

  The captain swallowed and lowered his gaze. “I beg your esteemed pardon, but it would…it would seem the cruelest sort of torture to keep this man alive.”

  “His sacrifice may yet save the Empire, Captain.”

  Di Alema’s gaze conveyed his confusion, but he bowed his obedience nonetheless. “Your will, Aurelia.”

  “Marius,” the Empress murmured then, and the High Lord followed her out into the hall.

  Valentina didn’t speak again until they were back in the palace and surrounded by her Praetorians. “As startling as it is to see a man so grievously maltreated,” she observed then, glancing at him, “I’m more concerned with finding those who harbor the knowledge to have performed such torment upon him.”

  “Unquestionably.”

  She shook her head and exhaled beneath a frown. “Not since Malachai’s Shades ran amuck have we seen such sinister and polluted use of elae. I would know who caused this corruption, Marius, but most importantly, I would know why.”

  Marius frowned. “You don’t think the motive torture?”

  “I think it was experimentation.” She crossed her arms and walked with her gaze narrowed in thought. “Did it occur to you that we may have found one of our missing Adepts?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Her colorless gaze flicked over him. “You know what must be done.”

  He grunted. “A general Questioning of Sormitáge maestros? Their indignant outrage will shake the University’s very foundations, Valentina.”

  “Their dignity be damned. If someone at the Sormitáge is behind this, I will know who. Put the Order to the work—discreetly. Let our esteemed Endoge soothe any ruffled feathers.”

  “We’re talking about thousands of Tellings…”

  Suddenly the Empress stopped and turned decisively to Marius. “It cannot be a coincidence that the zanthyr Phaedor has returned to the Empire on the eve of this egregious transgression against the very nature of elae. I would ask my great-uncle’s zanthyr for some explanation of these deeds, but until then, we’ll do everything in our own power to learn of their source.”

  Marius frowned at her words. Valentina ascribed all manner of omniscient abilities to Björn van Gelderan’s zanthyr. Even were the creature not impossibly disagreeable, Marius didn’t trust a man who reported to no one, thought himself above all worldly laws, vanished for decades upon the Lady knew what task, and then reappeared again, unannounced and unaccountable, acting as if he’d never left.

  But Valentina had her own knowledge of Björn’s zanthyr, information passed down from her father, Emperor Hallian IV, who’d survived the Adept Wars harboring secrets shared by no other living man. These were truths Valentina would not divulge to Marius even after centuries of companionship, nor would she be swayed from her opinions of Phaedor.

  While he had many misgivings about Björn’s zanthyr, the evening was already too grim and his own spirit too exhausted to endure the argument that would inevitably ensue should he attempt to contradict her. So he replied, “I will dispatch a ship at once.”

  Valentina shook her head. “You go, Marius. I trust no one else to handle negotiations with Phaedor. I told you earlier that I won’t make the same mistake again, and you well remember what happened when we last attempted to contact him in Adonnai.”

  How could he forget? An entire ship of imperial guardsmen had returned to the Sacred City with their arses handed to them via the flats of their own blades. Not a one could speak of what occurred save to say that the zanthyr was ‘currently unavailable to the Empress.’ By the time another ship navigated rough seas to reach that otherwise inaccessible portion of the Caladrian coast, the villa’s ephemeral visitor had vanished again.

  “Use every means at your disposal to bring him to me. No request should be denied if it will result in his attendance here. I must speak with him urgently.” Valentina searched Marius’s gaze with her own. “You will go, won’t you, mio caro?”

  Realizing he’d forgotten to answer her, Marius ducked his head in a bow of acquiescence. “I live but to serve your will, my Empress, as ever.”

  “Depart tonight. As soon as you have put the Order to their task.”

  Sighing, Marius nodded.

  Valentina leaned in to kiss him and let him taste of her gratitude. Lingering nose to nose, she murmured in her sultry voice, “Call the wind if you must. Sail swift.”

  Thus did the High Lord Marius di L'Arlesé take leave of his Empress to summon his fastest ship to sea.

  Eighteen

  “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”

  – The Karakurt

  Thought simpered at the edge of a mirror-dark lake whose waves were laced with crimson streaks of pain. It lingered there at the edge, too weary or too afraid to venture across those hazardous waters.

  “What a pathetic end,” a man said.

  Consuevé barked a laugh. “Can a traitor hope for more?”

  Falling, falling…

  Alertness flooded in on a tide of warning—

  Franco’s eyes flew open to darkness, and he sucked in his breath with a gasp. Hot, stabbing pain flamed in his gut like a poker straight from the forge. He attempted to move and found his hands still bound behind him. He laid still rather than provoke his injury further and tried instead to determine his surroundings.

  Cold, damp air clung to his skin, thick with the stench of brine, while the roughness against his cheek could only be sand. The hollow echo of water lapping at stone filled in more of the image his eyes were denied.

  “Before they bound me with the goracrosta…I managed a pattern to stop the bleeding, but you need a Healer…with more skill than I can claim.”

  Franco’s heart leapt in his chest. “Immanuel.” Gratitude and guilt momentarily stole further words from his tongue. For all he regretted involving the painter in this farce, he feared a solitary death, no matter that it would’ve been his just due.

  Then the artist’s words registered. “Wait—you healed me?”

  Franco heard shuffling and then a grunt as Immanuel inched closer. “Healing might be too…generous.” The artist’s voice that time came near to Franco’s ear. “Working the first strand is…new to me.”

  Franco felt like he was caught in some sort of convoluted dream. “Immanuel…are you a wielder?” His voice sounded strained and weak, much to his alarm.

  Immanuel answered into the darkness, “Truer to say…I’ve seen my share of first-strand patterns…and have some facility with their use.”

  Franco couldn’t be sure, but he thought he sensed a strain of regret beneath the artist’s words.

  The crash of waves caught his ear, whereupon the absurd and desperate folly of their situation struck him. “Where are we?”

  “A sea cave. The light may return before the sea…if fortune graces us. I think a cloud has passed before the moon.”

  “How long have we been here?”

  “Nearly six hours, I suspect. The tide is returning.”

  As lucidity crept back, Franco noticed that his body was trembling, and his muddled thoughts finally connected the intermittent shaking with a deep chill that clung to him. It took effort to recognize the source. “Am I…wet?”

  “I’m afraid so, the—”

  In that moment, the sky shed its veiling clouds and starlight speared down into the cavern through a gaping hole. Far above, and perfectly positioned in this jagged parting, a crescent-moon hung upon the lowest star of Cephrael’s Hand.

  Franco swore so heatedly that pain shot through him and stole his breath mid-curse.

  “Yes…” Immanuel murmured. “An ill omen to the superstitious. Consuevé and his men…were laughing as they dropped us…throug
h the hole you see above. No doubt they expected us to drown…but the tide was on the way out, and I…managed to get us up onto this bank.”

  Franco realized only then that the artist was talking low and brokenly into his ear not from some desire for secrecy but because his voice was too weak to raise above a whisper. A sudden spear of guilt struck Franco. He clenched his teeth against his own pain and twisted his body until he faced the painter. He looked the man over then with what light was available to him.

  Immanuel lay bound in coils of silver rope, which reached from a noose around his neck to lassoed ankles. His dark hair had come free of its queue and spread damply beneath his head, long locks encrusted with sand. In the sparse starlight, his handsome face appeared pallid.

  “Are you injured?” Franco’s eyes urgently searched Immanuel’s person for a wound. It grieved him to imagine any harm coming to the artist. “Did they hurt you?”

  Immanuel closed his eyes for the space of an indrawn breath. Even in such ignoble captivity, he maintained a startling elegance. “My infirmity comes from…this rope you see. Goracrosta is…brutal stuff. I’m…familiar with its use.” He opened his eyes again as he added with a gritty, humorless smile, “You appreciate its qualities less…on the receiving end of its bite.”

  Franco forced back a heavy blanket of regret and fury and gingerly pushed up on one elbow to get a better look at the cavern. They lay on a slender strip of sand. To their high side sharp rocks collided with the sloping cavern wall. To the low side lay the incoming tide. Already the waves were lapping just a stone’s toss from his feet.

  He swung a look back to Immanuel. “How in Epiphany’s name did you drag me out of the water? With your teeth?” He’d said it in jest, yet the artist merely gazed tragically at him. Franco gaped. “You pulled me onto land with your teeth?”

  Immanuel smiled apologetically. “It was that or let you drown. Perhaps you’d have preferred the latter?”

  Franco lay himself back down and exhaled a ragged sigh. It was hard not to let despondency overwhelm him. “I’d have preferred not to have involved you at all.”