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

by Melissa McPhail

  She gave him a quizzical look. “For what crime should I be holding you? I’m not in the habit of arresting Adepts simply because their allegiances appear to disagree with my own. If you’ve done aught else against the Sobra’s canon, some transgression against Alorin itself, feel free to confess it now.”

  Stricken mute, Franco shook his head.

  Alshiba called for William, her truthreader. At once he opened the doors and stood in the portal, attentive to her need. “Let him come,” she said.

  William turned and nodded to someone in the other room. Then he stepped aside to admit Niko van Amstel. Franco only just stifled a pained wince.

  “Franco, Franco!” Niko approached with open arms, and Franco stiffened as the man embraced him. Niko pulled away to take Franco by the shoulders, his blue eyes wide with concern. “I cannot convey how horrified I am by this turn of events. To think you experienced such an egregious indignity while a guest at my home—it appalls me! And Consuevé! The fiend!” He squeezed Franco’s shoulders. “I will see him called to justice. This I swear to you.”

  Franco stared wordlessly at him.

  “Your Excellency,” William said to Alshiba in a pointed tone.

  She turned him a brief look. “Yes, I understand.” To Franco then, she said, “We’re expected soon in Illume Belliel. Franco, I would we had the leisure to discuss this more, but time continues inexorably on with or without our consent.” She reached into a pocket of her gown and withdrew a ring, which she extended to him.

  Franco looked over the silver band engraved with patterns. It was wider but otherwise not unlike his Sormitáge rings. He lifted puzzled eyes back to Alshiba

  She offered in reply, her tone dripping with an irony all too apparent to him, “You see…Niko has named you for his deputy.” She continued on as Franco gaped at her, “Even had he not presented you for his choice, I would have pressed him to pick you, for Raine trusted you and spoke highly of you to me.” She held his gaze significantly as she finished in a tone nine layers thick with meaning, “I will place my faith in you to do what must be done to restore Balance to the realm. Do you accept this appointment?”

  Reeling, Franco stared at her while a thousand reasons advising against this action warred with all the reasons he must. Isabel’s words came at once to mind: ‘When a vision of the path ahead opens to us, Franco, we must not shy from it. Fate draws the shortest distance between two points.’

  Feeling a powerful sense of kismet at work—one which he both resented and feared with all his soul—Franco slid the ring onto his middle finger. The band expanded to fit over his knuckle and then shrank snugly back again to hug his flesh. He swallowed as he looked back to her. “Your will, my lady.”

  Alshiba looked to Niko. “You were wrong, you see?” When Franco lifted an inquiring gaze to her, she explained, “He believed you would refuse.”

  Niko managed a thin smile. “He continues to surprise me.”

  “Franco, I will contact you soon,” Alshiba said. She looked to Niko. “We must depart.”

  Niko extended his hand to Franco, who took it out of necessity. “I look forward to the great work we will do together, my old friend. The house is yours, should you care to linger. My Seneschal will see to your needs. Help yourself to anything you require.” Then he nodded farewell and followed Alshiba and the truthreader William out of the room.

  Well…that was unexpected.

  Franco pushed a hand through his hair and sank down onto the nearest chair. In his stillness, the strangeness of the circumstances collided with disbelief. Events so outrageous, so unpredictable—and frankly, unprecedented—that he was suddenly certain Fate must’ve had some hand in it, for however else could one explain such an ironic twist of his path?

  He thought back to that moment in the cave when he’d first seen Cephrael’s Hand glowing above. At the time, Franco had imagined it would be his last moment on this earth. Then everything had changed—as if looking upon Cephrael’s stars had transported him to an alternate universe where enemies were allies.

  As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t now deny the unnatural feeling of Fate’s hand working His will upon his life. He could sense it when he let himself, a sort of tension in the air, as if to herald an approaching storm. He could almost feel the threads of the pattern reaching out for him, binding him to a new course.

  In times before, he would’ve sought to drown the feeling in drink, as if in finding him dissipated, Fate might look for a better candidate. But today was not yesterday, and for better or worse, Franco understood now that he was bound to the First Lord’s game for eternity.

  It wasn’t lost on him that crossing paths with Immanuel di Nostri had been a turning point that brought him to this very future. He just wasn’t sure yet if the moment had opened upon providence or purgatory.

  Immanuel di Nostri…

  Thirteen hells, he had so many questions for the man! He’d never felt so confused, so unsure who to trust. He’d been half-hoping Immanuel would still be there when he’d first woken, but clearly the artist had told his tale and left.

  Abruptly Franco groaned and pushed both hands to his forehead as another realization inserted itself on his thoughts: somehow he was going to have to explain all of this to Dagmar and the First Lord!

  Franco fell back against the chair and exhaled a forceful breath. Would that Immanuel really had left him in the cave. Drowning seemed far preferable to the torture of such confession.

  Grimacing, Franco got to his feet, but all the while he readied himself for travel, he knew, somewhere, Cephrael was laughing.

  Twenty-Two

  “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”

  – Dareios, Prince of Kandori

  The moment Ean stepped off the leis into the tunnels of Tal’Afaq, a pervasive sense of wrongness accosted him. It radiated from the dark cavern walls and permeated the air and collected in shadowed corners where it multiplied. Ean had experienced a similar wrongness in Tyr’kharta—Isabel had named it the call of Balance seeking to be righted, and he’d eventually equated the feeling with his brother’s torment—but Sebastian’s captivity comprised only a small part of what attacked his senses now.

  Crossing the node beside him, Isabel’s fingers tightened on his arm, and her lips formed a thin line. As Dorn and Lem stepped off the leis behind her, she murmured, “What do you see?”

  Ean turned his gaze back to the tunnel ahead and the roiling tides of elae. He clenched his jaw. “Corruption.”

  Never had he seen the currents in such a frenzied state. What should’ve been golden appeared darkly veiled, and huge swaths of the tide carried a tar-like discharge that churned the fifth into a curdled, violent flow. More unsettling, these same currents carried the charred detritus of the first strand as a coating of ash. Ean knew instinctively that Dore Madden stood behind this desecration, yet to actually see it…

  The part of him that had been Arion roused in fury at such wrongs committed with the lifeforce. Leveling a piercing gaze on the path ahead, he summoned the fifth, took Isabel’s hand in his, and led them forward into the core of Tal’Afaq.

  Patterns of warding repeatedly barred their path, but these were not so complex as the patterns around Tal’Afaq’s exterior. Ean unworked them easily.

  The tunnel narrowed to a bare crevice, and Ean began feeling as if the entire force of the mountain bore down upon him. The light shining through the splice at its end reassured him of their path, however, and soon he was stepping out onto a wooden walkway. He turned to help Isabel, and then they surveyed their surroundings—

  Ean bit back a curse. She’d told him Dore was making monsters, but…

  The walkway hugged the cavern wall a good twenty feet above the floor, where the bodies had been laid. Chains of braided silver rope bound each man—what had once been men—to shackles in the floor, though it hardly seemed possible for animation to fill such wretched remains. They were alive in some capacity—Ean would’ve sensed this ev
en without seeing the horrid, violet-grey effluvia they excreted to pollute elae’s currents—but no hint of the first strand touched them. Whatever dark life fueled them, it was not of elae’s aspect.

  Easily fifty of these creatures were suffering through different states of transition. Their collective moans sounded a low wail, a tower clock’s inner cogs chinking off time’s slow decay; with each second passed, a hair’s width more of suppurating flesh expired, leaving a blackened husk as the gravestone of their humanity. For the flash of an instant, Ean feared Sebastian might be down there among those poor wretches, but then he sensed the first-strand pattern still vibrant upon his brother, leading elsewhere.

  Isabel withdrew her hand from his. In contrast to the leashed fury that fulminated around him, she held so much of the first strand that she nearly glowed with it. Great funnels of roseate light spiraled to comply with Isabel’s summons, and when she walked away from him, they trailed behind and around her like gossamer wings.

  “Go,” she said as she walked with slow deliberation, her mind focused and already distant. He’d brought the woman Isabel into the cavern with him, but it was Epiphany’s Prophet who walked away. “Find your brother.”

  “Isabel—” He knew her strength, yet he worried for her safety.

  She turned her blindfolded gaze to him. “These creatures must be destroyed before they can fully transform, Ean. Once the pattern of changing is complete, only immolation or a Merdanti blade can end their torment.”

  “We’ll stay with her, Your Highness.” Dorn stepped forward with a hand on his blade. “You’ll not see harm come to the lady on our watch.” He spoke with such reverent determination, Ean couldn’t help but believe him. Still, he lingered a moment longer, frowning with concern as he watched Isabel descend wooden stairs to the cavern floor.

  He cringed as she walked among the chained then, and clenched his teeth when he saw her bend and lay her hand on the rotting flesh of the nearest one. A terrible compassion furrowed her brow. The doomed man shuddered violently and then went still, and the violet effluvia ceased its pollution of the currents. Isabel moved to the next man.

  Ean swallowed and turned away.

  He preferred not to think on this antipathy—the use of the first strand to take life instead of imparting it, even to end such an unconscionable imprisonment. He felt her abhorrence and grief through the bond they shared, but he knew she wouldn’t flinch from her task, nor be swayed from her path, until all such creatures had been claimed unto death…until the horrific imbalance of their degraded existence had been righted.

  Ean carried the resonance of Isabel’s deep emotion with him as he headed off. Her mourning grounded his resolve.

  Above the eidola’s chamber, Ean found a giant, multi-leveled cavern outfitted as an armory. Smoke formed an acrid haze above the workers, lingering until a wielder’s pattern swirled it languidly upwards and away. On the cavern’s far side, rail cars filled with ore stood before the mouth of a manmade tunnel, while other cave openings hosted scaffolding, ropes, or twisted, unsavory-looking stairs for use in delivering the treasures reclaimed from the earth.

  Yet for all of this, the creature standing across the distance most claimed Ean’s attention. Fully transformed, this eidola patrolled a high walkway circling the cavern. Of deepest black from head to heel, it appeared a shadow made corporeal. Blades in leather straps were its only raiment, yet it walked like a normal man, with hands clasped behind its back, while its unnatural gaze swept across men and forges and weaponry with equal dispassion.

  Dispassion? Could such a creature show emotion? Could it even feel it? With morbid fascination, Ean wondered if its Merdanti face would reveal the same pliancy as a Shade’s chrome-reflective flesh. Suddenly determined to see its expression as he destroyed it, Ean abandoned the thread he’d been following to his brother’s location and headed around the cavern’s edge towards the eidola.

  Had Isabel been with him, she might’ve dissuaded him from this choice. Or had he been thinking of the woman Isabel instead of the actions of Epiphany’s Prophet, perhaps he would’ve chosen to seek his brother instead of abandoning his path. But Isabel’s emotions were resonating along their bond as she continued upon her dark work of salvation. Seeing one of the defiled creatures upright and hale, Ean couldn’t help but act in kind.

  The fifth amassed around the prince as he stalked the eidola, while the currents passing away from him smoothed and went dangerously flat. Keeping to the shadows, the prince stole around the edge of the walkway. His mind had gone as motionless as the currents that hovered in his vicinity, a deadly calm, yet his heart pumped a righteous cadence.

  He sensed eyes on him as he stalked his prey, but a glance around revealed only himself and the eidola upon this high path, and the creature’s attention was angled at the working men below. Ean pushed a buffer of still air before him to dampen his approach, and as he neared the creature, he drew his sword in silence. He came up behind it and took the first steps of the cortata, making a slow turn as he lifted the blade to strike.

  The creature came alert. It spun and caught Ean’s descending wrists with both hands, stopping his downward blade, and a snarl like a viper’s rattle escaped its throat. It was alarmingly strong.

  Ean wrestled against it, trying to free his hands from its grasp. For a moment, obsidian black eyes met his, and in that instant, Ean saw not the eidola but the Marquiin he’d freed from Bethamin’s malicious hold. They were the same eyes, no doubt concealing a similar virulent compulsion…chained by the same mind.

  Ean lashed out ropes of the fifth to bind the creature, but the lifeforce simply slid around the eidola like water over oiled canvas. Ean could no more make a binding stick to it than he could free his hands from its granite hold.

  The eidola forced Ean back, towards the walkway’s borderless edge. The first vestiges of fear hung like a fringe upon his thoughts; its prudence would’ve better served him before he’d begun upon this new course. Now he could do naught but finish what he’d started.

  Ean clenched his teeth, put all of his weight into his heel and pivoted. It felt like lifting a mountain, but he funneled elae into his intention and yanked the creature off its feet. The eidola flew into the cavern wall, taking Ean’s blade—and Ean himself—with it. Stone shattered beneath its body, and a thunderous crash reverberated through the chamber.

  As they both struggled back to their feet, still wrestling for Ean’s blade, the prince finally had the intellectual wherewithal to let go and withdraw the flow of elae that wakened the sword. The blade crashed to the floor as if magnetized to the earth’s core, and the creature went down with it. Ean made a hammer of his foot with the fifth and kicked. The eidola flew in a backwards arc and slammed down and through the wooden bridge to crash into the ledge beneath. It dislodged a cascade of barrels that had been stowed there. These in turn started an avalanche of debris that rained down on the workers, calling all eyes upwards in alarm and launching a general commotion on the cavern floor.

  Ean grabbed his sword and ran to where the eidola had fallen. Men were shouting now and pointing up, while others tried to extinguish a fire that had started when several barrels crashed into an open forge.

  Once again, Ean cursed his own cataclysmic stupidity. Couldn’t he make any decision that resulted in less than pandemonium?

  How long before a host of guards claimed him and then moved on to find Isabel? The very idea made him weak. His only hope now was drawing the eidola back into the caves and disposing of it there. He would have to trust to the currents to find his way out again.

  A swift glance showed him a path. He sheathed his sword, took a running leap and flung himself off the walkway. Pushing the fifth to propel himself, he crossed the distance easily. His hands caught a drape of netting, and he climbed to the wooden scaffolding above.

  Heart racing, he cast a look back at the eidola. The creature had regained the walkway and was staring up at him. Even as he watched, it took its own runnin
g leap.

  Ean ran for the tunnel opening midway along the high bridge. At the far end, a figure suddenly dropped down from a ledge above. He barely gave the man a glance, only noting with relief that he wasn’t another eidola, and turned sharply into the tunnel.

  Too soon, Ean heard feet pounding behind him. As he ran awkwardly through the dark, he reached his mind beyond his view and called the wind, then cast it back through the tunnel. But the effect was pale for lack of wind to fuel it, and the feet continued their pounding pursuit.

  Frustrated, the prince tried making the stone floor molten as Arion had done at the Citadel, but this complicated working required too much of Ean’s concentration, and he released the intention with naught but a dull ache in his head to show for the effort.

  The tunnel soon opened into another cavern, dimly lit by a few scattered torches, where the cave floor fell away into an abyss. Narrow ledges rimmed this hole, with a worn rope for the only handhold. Ean decided it would be as good a place as any to make his stand.

  He turned to face the dark cave mouth and drew his sword. His chest rose and fell with his breath, but long gone was the inner cry of vengeance that had lured him off his own path. Now he knew only remorse and determination—remorse for the brash and idiotic impulse that he’d allowed to overwhelm his reason; and determination that this grave misjudgment wouldn’t be his last play within the First Lord’s game.

  The eidola slowed its pace as it neared the end of the tunnel. To Ean, it seemed a demon emerging out of the depths, this time with its own blade held ready. It would be this test then that determined the victor. Ean made his mind calm, raised his sword, and rushed to meet the creature head-on.

  Their blades clashed in a reverberation of enchanted steel. The creature moved fast and struck hard with bone-jarring blows. It drove Ean backwards towards the abyss, and in a narrow moment that left his heart pounding, the prince came close enough to its edge to see the stalagmites like daggers lining its base. He drew elae through the cortata and forced the creature back, gaining vital distance if not the upper hand.