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

by Melissa McPhail

  Before him, a great bridge began to coalesce, conforming to Ean’s vision, its leading edge a roiling, dun-hued wave tumbling forth toward the high ridge, molding an ever-lengthening and elegant arch behind.

  “Your Highness, they’re coming,” Lem urged.

  “And we’re departing.” Ean didn’t remove his gaze from the bridge spanning the miles between him and the ridge, but he held a hand for Isabel to step first upon his knee, then upon the merlon. He joined her there in a single leap, and together they stepped upon his shimmering bridge of sand.

  Though he’d been certain it would hold them, he still felt a glow of pride when his feet found solid footing. They rushed then, with Dorn carrying Sebastian and Lem bringing up the rear.

  Ean didn’t look back until they all stood once again upon firm ground—many minutes later. Then he released elae and his intention—which was all that had been holding the bridge in place, a rather frightening truth to ponder—and sand rained down upon the plains.

  Ean swooned.

  Isabel caught one of his arms and Lem the other, even as she hissed, “Ean!”

  Doubtless he deserved the scolding in her tone. Between his battle with the eidola and his constant holding of the currents to aid his view—never mind the miles-long bridge of sand he’d just built to secure their escape—he’d done more with the lifeforce in a single day than in all the weeks of his training with Markal.

  Elae draining out of him now felt like it was pulling him inside-out. His mind had become so sensitive to the elemental fifth that he could perceive the far reaches of the horizon. The expansive sensation gave him vertigo. He had the heady impression of being squashed as gravity pulled him towards the earth’s core, while the vast spinning of the celestial globe hollowed his insides. Even the pressure of the air felt painful upon his skin.

  Ean pushed palms to his throbbing forehead and was oddly grateful that they didn’t sink into his flesh. “I’ll be all right.” His voice sounded hoarse…distant. “I just need…to rest a bit.”

  “Five hours,” Dorn said.

  Ean dropped his hands and cast the man a tormented look, though he couldn’t help noting, with both gratitude and a hint of envy, the ease and gentleness with which the big man held Sebastian’s unconscious form.

  “Five hours?” Sebastian needed much longer than this to heal, and Ean suspected he did also.

  Dorn twitched his head towards the fortress. “It’ll take them about five hours to get here. Three on horseback.”

  “Three,” Isabel said, her voice tight. “Then we must make good use of it.”

  ***

  Pelasommáyurek caught the eidola’s wrist in both hands and spun, twisting the creature off its feet. He used momentum to lift it high into the air and turned a tight circle before releasing his hold. The creature flew across the corridor and smashed into the wall with a gratifying shattering of stone.

  Unfortunately it wasn’t the stone of its own body, but that would come in time. Pelas was enjoying the fight for now. In his mind’s eye, he imagined he fought Darshan, and it lent a certain satisfaction to the encounter.

  Pelas stalked towards the eidola as it struggled up again. Such golem creatures felt no pain, but their minds could become muddled rather easily. It gained its feet before Pelas reached it, but instead of attacking him, the creature scrambled off down the corridor.

  Pelas grinned and dove into the chase.

  No creature in Alorin challenged him physically—at least none he’d met, though he imagined that perhaps a zanthyr might prove a fair adversary. The eidola at least came close to being a worthy opponent—that is, if he restrained himself from using his power. In the very least, fighting it held a certain therapeutic value; it required little thought and provided enough physical distraction to allow his mind to wander unmolested along the paths he’d been recently exploring.

  The eidola turned a sharp corner and dove into a twisting stairwell. It smashed each lamp as it descended in a rush, pitching the narrow tunnel into darkness. Smart. Such creatures were only as intelligent as the men they’d once been, as intelligent as any mind warped and twisted by deyjiin could be.

  Pelas called the currents to light the way and descended after it.

  He rather liked using elae. Until Tanis’s startling revelation about his fifth-strand nature, Pelas hadn’t known he worked the lifeforce innately. Now he understood much better—not only his own workings but also those of his brothers.

  How long had they been in collusion together against him? How long had they been using elae while exhorting its evils, jading him against his own nature, occluding truth? Doubtless since their arrival in Alorin. Darshan had no concept of hypocrisy, and Shail justified himself to no one.

  Pelas’s lips curled in a humorless smile as his feet made a rapid cadence on the steps. What a motley crew they were, the three of them—and Rinokh…poor doomed Rinokh, too disconnected to realize he’d been standing in Shail’s way.

  He heard the eidola burst through a door somewhere below and hastened to catch it before it got too far ahead, but as he emerged into the corridor, something struck him from the side.

  He spun, and a net of silver rope curtained over him. Heavy weights along the net’s edge bore him to one knee, while the goracrosta sucked elae from his grasp. Pelas endured a moment of dizzying disorientation. Needles stabbed him everywhere, and as the goracrosta nullified deyjiin in his veins, he felt himself growing weaker.

  Pelas gritted his teeth against the stabbing sensation in his flesh and turned his head to see the eidola standing beyond a line of men, and beside him, Dore Madden.

  Realization cut sharply in his thoughts. Ah, no…how foolish I’ve been…

  “Bind him in it,” Dore commanded with a cadaverous grin.

  Pelas felt webs of compulsion falling across his helpless mind. He could sense elae still, but it lay beyond his reach, as insubstantial as lamplight. Unable to resist, he fell to hands and knees, and then to his stomach. He turned his head to look up as Dore approached.

  The wielder looked gleefully down upon him, veritably slavering. The unhealthy lust he exuded roused disgust enough in Pelas to momentarily overwhelm even the goracrosta’s sharp bite. Dore Madden was naught but a carrion bird, hungering with such decayed desires that it couldn’t even stomach the dead until the corpse had rotted beyond recognition.

  Dore’s flickering tongue licked across his whitened lips. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” His eye twitched with what might’ve been a smile, but Dore deigned no expression unless it inspired dread. He spun away, and his next words floated back on a tide of foreboding. “Take him to the Prophet.”

  Twenty-Four

  “None are more righteous than a sinner reformed.”

  – Cassius of Rogue

  The royal cousin Fynnlar val Lorian couldn’t decide whether his near death had transported him to Elysium or the Fields of Punishment.

  On the one hand, he was a prisoner at the end of a node with no hope of regaining Alorin save by the grace of some infernal dragon—or worse, a zanthyr. He couldn’t move an inch without sensing some immortal creature watching him, no doubt imagining a new way to broil and eat him…or just eat him.

  He fancied himself possessed of a certain indigestibility—what with all the wine he’d consumed, surely his flesh had become pickled. He might’ve told them so to curtail any culinary interest, save that he didn’t want to put the idea into their heads on the off-chance they hadn’t actually thought about eating him yet.

  It doubly grated on Fynnlar that he owed his life to a zanthyr, even if she was impossibly buxom and leggy. Never mind that she wouldn’t give him the time of day now that she’d pasted him back together again.

  Then there was Alyneri, who’d never been more confusing. One day she’d be impossibly morose and burst into tears if he so much as looked at her. Then on the next she’d be following that zanthyr Vaile around all the day and glaring at him for only doing what he did best—whi
ch was to say sitting idly and getting drunk…or perhaps it was more accurate to say working hard at getting drunk. Yes, that had a nicer ring to it.

  Vaile, Fynn had learned, was the steward of the First Lord’s sa’reyth, which really meant she had license to kill anyone she chose. Fynn thought it a bit careless of the First Lord, considering how indiscriminate zanthyrs were about killing people, but this didn’t explain Alyneri’s attachment to the woman.

  The one time Fynn had followed them to see where they went on their excursions, he’d found them in a clearing doing some kind of slow, spiraling dance. When they saw him watching, they’d leveled him dual glares of such reproach that he’d scurried back to the safety of Balaji’s attentions and not emerged again for several days.

  On that bright note—and the only boon he could find in all of this, really—Balaji had made him the beneficiary of an endless supply of wine for tasting and testing.

  In truth, Fynn preferred Ramu’s wines—Balaji’s were a tad sweet for Fynn’s palate—but Ramu was rarely about. Moreover, whenever the Lord of the Heavens did make an appearance, he always watched Fynn with the sort of knowing gaze that made him worry about his future, and that was rarely a pleasant contemplation.

  The parting of drapes drew Fynn’s gaze, and he roused from his ruminations as Balaji walked in with a goblet in hand. “And how are you faring this fine morning, Fynnlar, son of Ryan?”

  Fynn scowled into his empty goblet. For any morning to be considered fine, it must necessarily not include a reminder of his imperious father. He raised his goblet dispiritedly. “Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches. That’s my motto.”

  “It seems to me a very pragmatic outlook on life.” Balaji switched out the goblets in Fynn’s hand. “Your logic is incontrovertible.”

  Fynn eyed him narrowly, trying to decide if he was mocking him, but the youth who was ‘older than the sun’ merely regarded him with a bright smile. Fynn saluted him with his new, full goblet and took a long swallow of wine. He decided he liked Balaji—inasmuch as he was of a mind to like any creature that could squash him with one toe.

  Balaji watched him with a hopeful gaze.

  Fynn made a show of swishing the wine around in his mouth and sucking in air across his tongue in that incredibly annoying way of true connoisseurs. None of these treatments made the wine less sweet, but beggars couldn’t be too choosy or their benefactors got offended and found someone else to benefact…benefice? Whatever.

  “Well?” asked the drachwyr.

  Fynn waggled his hand from side to side. “It’s still a bit sweet to be a Volga…but it has nice fruit and a complex finish.” He’d heard one of those pompous Solvayre critics say that once. The Agasi far surpassed even the Veneiseans when it came to snobbery and pretention. “Of course…I’ll need to consume it all to appreciate its full body and flavor, the subtlety of which alters as the wine airs.”

  Balaji’s eyes twinkled. “I’m not sure the wine has much time to breathe in your goblet, my new friend Fynnlar, but it is a fine day for tasting and making wine.”

  Fynn raised his goblet in salute. “Whenever is it not, He Who Chases the Shadow Edge of the Heavens?”

  Balaji arched an amused brow. “You have somehow managed to include all of our names together this time.”

  “Oh?” Fynn frowned. “He Who Walks With the Bosom of the Sun?”

  “Now you have confused me with my sisters.”

  Fynn made a face as he scratched his unshaved jaw. “If you didn’t have such bloody long names we mortals might be able to remember them properly.”

  Balaji smiled and took a seat across from Fynn. “Our names were bestowed upon us by our Maker. We might’ve picked differently if given the choice.”

  “By your Maker…you mean like the Maker?”

  “The Father of All, yes.”

  Fynn drank more wine. “Who was your mother then?”

  “As much as we could be said to have a mother, it would be this fair realm, my new friend Fynnlar.”

  Fynn frowned. “Are you speaking metaphorically? Because when vague, philosophical metaphors and me meet on the street, I just keep walking—unless they’re sexual in nature, in which case I like to stop and buy them a drink.”

  “You display uncommon wisdom in this.”

  Fynn drew back a little. “I—what? I do?”

  Balaji crossed his knees and reclined in his chair. “To stop and smell the flowers, as they say, is to truly partake of the many experiences this life has to offer. When a man is become too busy to enjoy the life he leads, one must ask why he leads it at all.”

  “Much better to be a follower, I always say.” Fynn belched and motioned with his goblet. “That way you can see where the edge is before you walk off it.”

  Balaji sank his chin onto his hand and cast Fynn a winsome smile. “Truly, you are a fount of wisdom.”

  Fynn grinned accommodatingly. He wondered why Alyneri said Balaji made her nervous. Fynn found He Who Walked the Horizon of Whatever to be the most amiable of all the man-eating creatures he’d met so far.

  “Balaji?” Náiir stuck his head into the room. Then he saw Fynn and gave him a smile. “Oh, good morning, Fynnlar, cousin of Trell.”

  Fynn belched and held up his cup in greeting.

  The Chaser of the Dawn looked back to his brother. “You might want to come moderate the tempest.”

  Balaji arched a brow. “So early?” He motioned to Fynn as he stood. “Come, my new friend, Fynnlar. We must see what excitement the day is providing.”

  Fynn roused from his chair. “Alas, I fear my cup runneth empty.”

  Balaji cast him a look over his shoulder as he followed Náiir from the room. “I do bid you gaze again.”

  Fynn looked into the goblet and saw the bottom quite clearly. He was just opening his mouth to say so when a sanguineous liquid began swirling up until it nearly touched the brim.

  Fynn sighed. If Elysium existed, the gods there would have such miraculous goblets—only their endless supply wouldn’t be dependent upon a dragon’s magnanimous disposition.

  When they reached the tempest Náiir had spoken of, the blue-eyed drachwyr Mithaiya stood on one side of an argument fomenting clouds, and the zanthyr Vaile stood on the other filling them with lightning. Whatever language they were speaking, they sounded to Fynn like two cats throwing a hissing fit inside a rain barrel.

  Behind Mithaiya stood a motley crew of certain misfits led by none other than—

  “Carian vran Lea!” Fynn stalked over and threw his arms around the pirate, not even caring that he nearly spilled his wine in the process.

  A grinning Carian took him by the shoulders and looked him over. “Fynnlar! About time you dragged your lazy arse out of bed.”

  Fynn scowled. “Oh sure. I only had a few seven-inch spikes through my gut. Nothing to concern you. I didn’t nearly die. No need to write.”

  “But I heard that a zanthyr healed you.” Carian’s eyes traveled up and down Vaile’s form where she now stood in a boiling silence, thanks to Balaji’s intervention. A gleam came to his eye. “I definitely would’ve taken advantage of that.”

  As if hearing him speaking of her, Vaile’s emerald gaze shifted to them. Carian waggled his brows saucily and gave her a suggestive grin. She looked away again with withering indifference.

  “Yep. Lots to take advantage of there.” Fynn drank his wine. “I see you escaped T’khendar then. Balaji said you were having quite the frolic when he saw you last.”

  Carian grinned lustily over at Mithaiya, who was glaring at Vaile while Balaji spoke soothing words in a foreign tongue. “Balaji doesn’t know the half of it, mate.”

  “So what are you doing here, vran Lea?”

  Carian shifted his gaze back to him. “Oh, Rohre and I were on an assignment and got separated. We’d agreed to meet back here at the sa’reyth. Word is the Espial left the fête with a painter,” his gaze gleamed with mischievous insinuation, “so there�
�s no telling how long you’ll have the benefit of my excellent company. So, Fynnlar…” he grinned, “are you finally ready to pay me that money you owe me?”

  Fynn snorted into his wine. “Vran Lea, you know perfectly well I only pay my enemies, and then only when there’s mortal threat involved.”

  A big man wearing a navy kilt separated himself from the group standing behind Mithaiya. He had the most massive calves Fynn had ever seen on a man—as opposed to, possibly, a bear. As he neared, he looked Fynn over with colorless truthreader’s eyes. “Friend of yours, Carian?”

  The pirate held out a hand. “Gannon Bair, may I present Fynnlar val Lorian, a wanton reprobate and by far the best man for the job.”

  “Job?” Fynn scowled at him. “I have my hands full as it is.”

  Gannon eyed him skeptically. “Doing what, may I ask?”

  Fynn glared at Carian. “Why’d you bring him? You know perfectly well how terribly truthreaders and I get along.”

  “Carian tells me you have no moral compass,” Gannon said.

  Fynn straightened his shoulders. “I had one once, but I found it was greatly hindering my dissolute and aimless wanderings. I think I left it somewhere in Agasan. If you’re looking for one, my lord father keeps extras in a drawer. He’ll sell one to you for the special low price of your eternally indentured soul.”

  Gannon shifted his stance and rested a hand on the dirk at his belt. “I’ve heard of Prince Ryan. He’s well-respected.”

  “Uh-huh,” Fynn grumbled, “among reputable people. Look vran Lea—whatever this job of yours is, I can’t just leave. I’m doing very important work for He Who Caws in the Heavens, but more importantly, my cousin is still missing.”

  Gannon looked up at him under his heavy black brows. “And just how are you contributing to the search effort?”