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

by Melissa McPhail

  One had to admire the val Lorians at least for their tenacity, though their other common traits rankled. Viernan couldn’t abide honest men. What was honor in the end? A word.

  Viernan would’ve liked to kill Trell—he would’ve liked to have done the deed personally—but Trell’s comment about Cephrael…hal’Jaitar had perceived no glibness in its utterance. This bothered him immensely.

  If the Prince had somehow gained the angiel’s favor, as he’d intimated, then killing him could have personal consequences. Balance clung like a death shroud to those who walked in the light of Cephrael’s stars. Viernan was accordingly loath to cause some disturbance that might draw the angiel’s attention to himself.

  But Trell val Lorian posed a dilemma.

  Viernan still hadn’t discovered where Trell had been for the past five years, and this he had to know. His Shamshir’im network traded in secrets. It galled Viernan to think some other network had protected the secret of Trell’s survival all this time. But more to the point, who else knew that Trell val Lorian lived, and what had they done, or could they do, with this information? The wrong others knowing of Trell’s survival could spell disaster for his prince and their kingdom. Moreover, Viernan couldn’t be certain that Trell wasn’t a spy.

  It all came down to the truth of his past. Viernan had to know what Trell had been doing since escaping death in the Fire Sea.

  Since Trell proved less than forthcoming with answers, Viernan had questioned the Saldarian, Raliax; interrogated him within an inch of his skin—perhaps it was truer to say inside an inch of his skin—to determine what had really happened upon the Dawn Chaser five years prior, when Viernan had first tasked the Saldarian with Trell’s death.

  Hal’Jaitar admitted a truthreader would have proven helpful during that questioning, for Raliax’s agonized shrieks and screams had somewhat limited the coherence of his answers. Nonetheless, hal’Jaitar had put some pieces of this puzzle together, and he misliked the picture that was forming.

  Raliax claimed the prince had known nothing when he’d questioned him aboard the Dawn Chaser. Yet something in his description of those proceedings…hal’Jaitar was certain the young prince had been truthbound, which might account for his later amnesia. It also meant he daren’t truthread Trell now to learn what he’d been doing for the past five years, for it could drive the answers he sought into further occlusion.

  But a truthbinding powerful enough to make a man forget his entire existence indicated a Sormitáge trained Adept. Worse, it implied that King Gydryn had already held Prince Radov in suspicion ever before he sent his middle son from Calgaryn.

  Could the Northmen have suspected M’Nador’s duplicity all those years ago? And if so, what had Morin d’Hain and his spies learned in the intervening years?

  Most unsettling was the idea that Gydryn val Lorian knew of Radov’s duplicity and had come to this parley in spite of it. This would imply the King of Dannym possessed far more guile than hal’Jaitar had given him credit for. It would mean rethinking all of their conversations, every interaction…

  He saw but a single solution to finding out what Trell knew…one he’d been hoping to avoid. Hal’Jaitar shifted his shoulders irritably, but it wasn’t the silk that suddenly chafed.

  When Jai’Gar had seen fit only to bless Viernan with a useless daughter, he’d cursed Huhktu, the God of Bones; but an education with the Sorceresses of Vest had made his previously willful offspring pliant, malleable and endlessly resourceful in fulfilling his wishes.

  People were no different from any other animal. With enough force, enough pain laid in, even the most wayward of wills might become tractable.

  Still, he trusted his daughter as much as he trusted a Sundragon, which was to say not at all. How could he trust a woman educated by whores in the vilest aspects of an Adept’s craft?

  Oh, Taliah was imminently useful, but she’d been eternally tainted, deflowered and corrupted into a wanton harlot, the integrity of her nature fractured into shards that could never be reassembled. Some workings of an Adept’s craft lay beneath even Viernan hal’Jaitar’s dubious morals. Taliah worked all of them.

  Abruptly hal’Jaitar spun and walked to a line of heavy, dangling cords. Pulling one, he waited for the hall’s sculpted doors to open. When they did, a black-robed Shamshir’im stood in the portal.

  “Fetch Taliah to meet me in the prince’s cell.”

  The man bowed wordlessly and departed.

  “Hmm…what?” Radov roused with a start. “What did you say, Viernan?”

  “Nothing, Your Grace. I will see you in the morning.” He motioned to the guard standing in the doorway, and the man moved to escort Radov back to his chambers and his waiting absinthe.

  ***

  A hard slap to his face shocked Trell back to awareness. He blinked to orient himself to his surroundings, and only then did he realize that the room had changed since he’d slipped into a pain-induced unconsciousness. Trying to focus in the dim, wavering light, he saw two indistinct shapes hovering over him.

  His life had become a sequence of disjointed, agonizing interludes with huge gaps of darkness in between. Without anchors such as meals, or seeing the sun rise and set, he’d lost all semblance of the passage of time. He might’ve been in hal’Jaitar’s dungeon for a fortnight or a year—he had no way of knowing. Nor could he tell how long they let him recover between bouts of torment. His brain, often deprived of oxygen and always of proper nourishment, had shut down such non-essential functions as coherent thought.

  He heard voices speaking above him.

  “…bade me use only barbaric means of questioning him, father,” a female voice was saying, “what did you expect—”

  “I expect results, Taliah!” a male voice snapped. Trell recognized hal’Jaitar’s acerbic tone as much as the accent of his vowels. “I expect my interrogators to get my questions answered regardless of how sophisticated or crude their tools.”

  “Yes, father.” Taliah bowed her head and pressed her lips together in a thin line.

  “Ah…” Trell felt the knives of hal’Jaitar’s gaze settle on him. “The prince returns to us.”

  Trell could barely make out hal’Jaitar’s dark eyes among the shadows of his black keffiyeh.

  “I offer you one last chance, Prince of Dannym,” he murmured. “Tell me all, and I will let your end be swift.”

  “…amnesia…” Trell managed a raw whisper. It was the only answer he ever gave, no matter their questions, no matter what they did to make him scream.

  A man develops ways of enduring pain, of becoming inured to it…or perhaps, if not inured, at least accepting of the way of things. Trell had learned to let the pain consume him without protest, without fighting it; perhaps…he’d like to believe he’d found a way of surrendering to the pain without surrendering to the one administering it, but it was hard to say what really happened in those moments of intensity when even thought fled from his screams.

  He’d spent many hours thinking through these ideas in the early days of his captivity, of his torture, when he’d clung to honor and his own promise of eventual retribution. Now he simply clung to life and the single word: amnesia. It explained everything, and nothing, and he could still utter it no matter how swollen his lips or tongue…

  “It’s all he ever claims,” Taliah remarked churlishly. “I’ve used the instruments of your instruction and healed him each time to suffer anew, but he never offers anything beyond this word.”

  “You haven’t made him scream emphatically enough!” Hal’Jaitar’s voice cut like a whip. “You must put him into your control, Taliah. You should have broken him by now.”

  “Because an intelligent man screams doesn’t mean you’ve broken him, father.” Taliah’s tone remained respectful. Her voice sounded a soft and delicate melody against hal’Jaitar’s percussive outbursts. “Perhaps for an ignorant man it would be so, one with little to hold onto but brute defiance. A scream then means you’ve pulled from him the onl
y crutch he clings to.” She placed a hand on Trell’s brow, still damp with the sweat of their last encounter. “But this one is far too sophisticated.” Her hand stroked the hair from Trell’s eyes, petting it gently back, yet no kindness lay in the act. Her motions, like her voice, remained oddly detached. “A scream from him means only that in that moment his pain was intense. An intelligent man requires more sophisticated torture.”

  Hal’Jaitar looked Trell over, and his lips formed a tight line. “Very well…do what you will with him.”

  Taliah made a little gasp.

  “I must have answers, Taliah.”

  “Yes, father—oh, yes!” She turned and waved to someone—Trell couldn’t see who and cared not enough to move his head to do so.

  “He must be relocated elsewhere from this place,” hal’Jaitar groused. “I won’t have you sullying my dungeons with stains upon the currents that shout your illicit workings to the world.”

  “Yes, father.” Taliah waved to her men. “Come, come—take him.”

  Hands closed around his body, pain seared through Trell, and he gratefully surrendered to darkness.

  When he next woke, light burned his eyes. He blinked in the brightness, eyes watering.

  He felt surprisingly whole and pushed up to sitting to better look around. They’d moved him to a rectangular, windowless chamber of white stone, well lit by a massive iron chandelier hanging from the arched ceiling. Besides the cot on which he lay, the chamber held no furnishings, only a raised marble platform with chains set into either end.

  That looks rather unpromising.

  He pushed his legs over the side of the cot and looked down at his body. Pale circles lined the flesh on the inside of his arms. He vaguely recalled being nailed to the stone wall—an early torment—and suffered a latent shudder at recollecting the moment. But other than these scars, he found the flesh of his bare chest and arms surprisingly unmarred, especially considering what he’d endured.

  Someone had washed him during his most recent unconsciousness, and now a pair of shalwar covered his legs, held up by a drawstring sitting low around his hips. He tried to remember how he’d come to that room, and why, but his mind recalled only cold and darkness and fiery pain. Days or weeks—he still didn’t know—blended into one long incident without a clear beginning or end.

  Trell pushed a hand through his hair and eyed the platform and its manacles. Clearly hal’Jaitar wasn’t done with him yet. He had to wonder if the man ever would be.

  Trell slumped back against the cold stone wall and let his hands fall to his sides. It was so odd, this existence, filled with equal portions of hopelessness and grief, defiance and resignation.

  He supposed his years on the front lines had in some ways prepared him for captivity. Soldiers lived every day with the knowledge that each moment could be their last, and commanders rarely went into battle without understanding what fate awaited them should they be captured by the enemy, much less the acceptance of their own potential death in the battle.

  At certain times in his short though successful military career, Trell had imagined a life of imprisonment. A man didn’t live long on the front lines without coming to grips with such possibilities. You made a sort of pact with Death when you went to war, choosing him as your ultimate opponent on the field.

  A grating sound from the far side of the room drew Trell’s gaze, and he turned his head to see a portion of the stone wall swinging inward. Through the parting came Taliah hal’Jaitar.

  Trell remembered her—even if the things she’d done to him remained blessedly blurred. He equated her with pain now on an existential level. His pulse automatically quickened, his muscles tensed, readying to fight.

  Yet fighting was both impractical and all but impossible. Taliah had already proven that she could use his life pattern to incapacitate him, and the two hulking brutes that entered behind her seemed more than capable of doing the same with elbows and fists.

  Taliah stopped in front of him. “Hello, Prince Trell.”

  Trell looked up and met her gaze. He’d never felt such aversion to a woman before; but then, he’d never had a woman repeatedly torture him, either.

  Taliah was as diminutive as they came, fine boned and flat chested—a fact easily noted since she wore a dress cut nearly to her navel. She seemed the frailest of creatures; that is, until one looked into her eyes and saw that actually the girl Taliah had died long ago. Something dead inhabited her body now, animating her corpse with empty life like some horrific marionette.

  Trell was determined to tell her nothing, to give her nothing of his own free will. It had become his personal crusade. He suspected they were used to such behavior from prisoners—seasoned inquisitors ate defiance on toast. But he had nothing else to cling to but what free will he possessed, little more than he might collect in dirt from between the stones of his cell.

  “I see that my Healing took well,” Taliah remarked as those dead eyes looked Trell over. “We should begin anew. My father is impatient for your information. Stand up.”

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  Her gaze hardened. “You can stand on your own, or I can make you stand.”

  “Then make me.”

  Taliah pursed her lips and looked to the hulks. They grabbed Trell by the arms and hauled him to his feet. He hung there between their arms.

  “This would go much easier for you if you merely cooperated,” she complained with a hint of petulance.

  “I somehow doubt that, Taliah.”

  Setting her lips in a line, Taliah motioned to the hulks, and they dragged Trell to the platform. He struggled, but vainly. The two men had the strength of ten, and without much difficulty they’d stretched him on his back, flat against the cold marble. One pulled his arms overhead to fasten the manacles around his wrists, while the other spread his legs and clamped irons around his ankles.

  “Perhaps I should explain how things have changed,” Taliah noted as the hulks were shackling him.

  Trell just stared at the iron chandelier and gritted his teeth, preparing himself. Things seemed just about the same to him.

  “I lost my virginity to a man like Ghan,” Taliah said, shifting her gaze to the hulk who was tightening the chains, stretching Trell’s arms painfully over his head. “He tied me, much as you’re tied now, and raped me until I was torn deep inside and my blood soaked the sheets. Then he turned me over and repeated the process with my backside.” She gave a little smile, confused and embittered. “I was nine.”

  Trell stared at her. “Blessed Epiphany…why?”

  She shrugged, a mere twitch of slim shoulders. “This is how the Sorceresses of Vest initiate new members to their Order. It’s impossible to see both paths of Alir until one has found a place of neutrality.”

  The hulks finished their work, and Taliah walked around the platform testing the tautness in the chains. Though Trell hadn’t asked, she told him, “The Vestian Sorceresy believes every Adept has two potential paths; we call these the Paths of Alir, the heart-light. An Adept is called to whichever of the paths sings most loudly in the depths of his or her heart.” She placed a hand on his ankle, and then yanked the chain tighter.

  Trell sucked in his breath with a hiss.

  “The light path is called hal’alir, and the dark path is mor’alir.” Taliah tightened the other ankle with a similar painful outcome. “Either path is a valid pursuit, but once chosen, only one can be walked. To choose mor’alir is to abandon hal’alir. A mor’alir Adept, such as myself, might still Heal, but only when Healing crosses the mor’alir path. You see,” she added with a regretful little smile, chilling beneath her empty eyes, “once a Healer has taken the blood of men unto herself, her soul will forever bear its stain.”

  She pulled on the chains holding his arms over his head, and seeming to find them tight enough, nodded to the hulks. They left and pulled the wall shut behind them.

  “Most initiates chose which path they will follow.”

  “And you
chose mor’alir,’ Trell growled, teeth gritted against the pain of joints already strained.

  “Oh, no,” she said from behind him, “my father chose for me. I was only nine. How could I know which path sang in my heart?” She stopped beside his head and trailed her nails lightly down the underside of his arm, tracing a line from scar to scar. “You’re a beautiful man. I hated harming you. This way will be much better.”

  Trell couldn’t imagine how. His hands were already going numb, and she hadn’t even started on him yet. Dread tasted sharp on his tongue.

  His shoulders were cramping where they pulled so tightly against his head, bringing an ache to his jaw, but he managed to ask, “Why not…employ a truthreader?”

  It seemed too obvious a solution for stealing a man’s secrets, perhaps too civilized for Viernan hal’Jaitar—yet the man was Sormitáge trained and knew the Adept craft. Trell had many times wondered, while in the throes of some new agony, why if hal’Jaitar had wanted the truth so desperately did he not use an Adept uniquely designed by nature to ferret it out.

  “My father distrusts Adepts of the fourth,” Taliah answered idly. She trailed her nails now down Trell’s chest, tracing the muscular depression from breastbone to navel. “He knows too well how truthreaders are taught duplicity, how they circumvent their inability to lie with half-truths and practiced double-speak.” Her fingers tugged at the drawstring of his shalwar, loosening the cloth around his hips. “But my father believes you were truthbound before Raliax found you at sea. He wouldn’t risk another reading on you, even did he trust the Adept performing it. No,” she concluded, “my methods will be more effective.”

  With that, she climbed up on the marble platform and swung her leg across his hips, coming to rest atop him. For all Taliah revolted him, still his loins stirred traitorously beneath her warmth.

  “My father thinks me a whore.” She pushed back her long, dark hair and swept a stray piece from her eyes. “He rarely lets me use my own methods on his prisoners. He doesn’t really trust me. But you’ve driven him to a desperate position. For that, I thank you.”