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

by Melissa McPhail

  “And you expect you’ll pin me?”

  The first hint of a smile shone in his brother’s eyes. “I am spry.”

  “And I’ve got at least thirty pounds on you, little brother.”

  “Which will make you slow.”

  Sebastian grunted. “We’ll see.” He looked back to Isabel with skepticism pinned to every feature. “You expect this will work?”

  “It is the best solution we’ve found. If you have another, Sebastian, please share it with us.”

  Sebastian ground his teeth. “No.” He turned back to Ean. “And what if I pin you? What’s to stop me from taking your life as Dore’s will commands?”

  “Isabel and I will do our best to prevent your bringing lasting harm to Ean,” Dareios replied, “without equally bringing lasting harm to you…or to ourselves.”

  Sebastian arched a leery brow. “Tell me one last time why Ean can’t just read me now, while I’m—Shade and darkness, while I retain some semblance of myself?” He heard the raw despair in his own voice and stifled a grimace, grinding his teeth instead.

  The other three exchanged glances, whereupon Isabel answered, “Many of the patterns Dore implanted lie dormant until invoked by circumstance.”

  “Unless they’re actively in use,” Ean added, himself sounding grim, “I won’t be able to see them. If I can’t reconstruct the entire matrix, I won’t be able to free you—though I’ll unwork anything I find, if I think it won’t harm you. From what I’ve seen of your mind already, Dore interwove many strands of the fourth within your consciousness. I have to be able to find the fifth-strand pattern that binds all the compulsion patterns together and holds them in place. To do this, I must be able to reconstruct the entire matrix.”

  Sebastian closed his eyes and focused all his will on trying to stifle his frustration and imminent fear—fear of harming his brother, and a dreadful fear of returning to that tortured imprisonment where he barely knew himself.

  “So the plan,” he began slowly, letting his gaze fall in turn on all assembled, “is to revert me to a raving lunatic, release that lunatic on my youngest brother, and simply hope I don’t kill him before he finds the necessary patterns locked in my head?”

  “You have the right of it, Sebastian.” Isabel’s tone brooked no more discussion. She lifted her blindfolded gaze to the heavens, clouding now with thunderheads. “Let this be done. The day grows darker by the second.”

  “Ne’er a truer word was spoken, my lady,” Sebastian groused.

  Dareios opened his arms. “Come, my princes.”

  They followed him onto the sand. Dareios stopped in the middle of the court and used his foot to carve a line in the earth. He motioned the brothers to either side of it. “If you will both remove your kurtas…”

  Sebastian drew the tunic over his head and handed it to Dareios. Ean did the same.

  Sebastian studied his brother as he would any opponent then. He’d been right in estimating the differences in their frames. Whereas his younger brother sported the broad shoulders and smooth muscle of a man barely beyond his teens, Sebastian’s frame had been thickened and hardened by his years in N’ghorra. They were both of them lean, however, both of a height with each other.

  “Ready yourselves,” Isabel murmured. The implication in her tone held more ominous portent than the storm brewing over their heads. Tension bound all four of the Adepts like a strung cord tightening with every breath. Then Sebastian felt a lifting, as if a cool breeze through his consciousness. In that moment, his soul screamed.

  In the next, madness descended.

  ***

  Ean stood bare-chested before his brother and contemplated the coming confrontation with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he yearned to have Sebastian restored to him and was willing to go to any extremes to achieve this. On the other, he didn’t imagine the process was going to be pleasant for either of them.

  “Ready yourselves,” Isabel murmured.

  Ean hardened his resolve, but still he flinched when he saw the darkness return to his brother’s gaze—it was like watching Sebastian being erased before his very eyes.

  With his next breath, Sebastian launched at him.

  Ean ducked to meet him and they locked heads, arms and shoulders bracing as their feet made a fast circle in the sand. His brother had weight on his side, as he’d promised, but Ean’s reach was longer. He dug in his feet to keep from being overpowered.

  In those first moments, Sebastian tried repeatedly to shove him down, hands grappling for purchase on Ean’s limbs. Ean just tried to maintain his locked position, shoulder to shoulder, and keep the bulk of his body out of reach—for he both needed and used every moment of contact to study his brother’s mind. What he found horrified him all over again, for now he understood better each pattern’s purpose.

  Sebastian’s mind hosted a honeycomb matrix of fourth-strand compulsion patterns. Ean scanned each pattern in the matrix while also looking for the tell-tale symbology Dareios had been schooling into him. Here a pattern made to deny any thought Sebastian had if it ran counter to Dore’s earlier compulsion; there one that told Sebastian he had no true thoughts of his own; one insisted any action he took without Dore’s approval would be disastrous, and another enforced pain if he dared to disobey. One specifically sought positive emotions such as hope and twisted them into apathy. Still others imposed brutal illness if he failed to comply. And in every pattern appeared the central combination that ordered Sebastian to obey Dore in all things.

  Ean felt sick. This wasn’t merely compulsion forcing a man to do things against his will, this was nullification of his will entirely. To be so imprisoned day in and out, unending…he could barely comprehend such a hell.

  Suddenly Sebastian growled and dropped a hand to grab for Ean’s leg. Ean’s foot slipped in the sand, and he went down on one knee. Sebastian was at him instantly, using the full force of his weight to bear Ean to the ground. Ean struggled to regain both feet, straining to the full extent of his power. He dared not work the fifth, not even to fuel his own strength, not with Sebastian so close and those patterns in his head set to react against the fifth.

  With a grunt of effort, Ean made it back to his feet. The brawl would’ve been exciting if there wasn’t such desperation in it. If his brother got a firm hold on his neck, he could break it before anyone could stop him—he was strong enough to do so. Worse was how murderously he pursued this effort, his gaze veiled with a darkness that seemed almost inhuman.

  Ean sensed that Sebastian was fighting the compulsion too—for all the good it did him. Yet as he grabbed hold around Sebastian’s neck again and their eyes met, Ean saw the glimmer of his brother suffering beneath this overwhelming subjugation of his will. The moment broke his heart.

  Thunder sounded above them, and a chill rain started falling, skewing their hold on each other. Ean attacked his brother with renewed determination.

  He slipped free of Sebastian’s hold and darted low to grab his waist. Sebastian twisted, and Ean’s arms slid down his hips to lock around his leg instead, knocking him to hands and knees. Sebastian scrambled on all fours, but Ean climbed up his leg and caught his hips again. They fell then, spinning in the sand, and Ean at last pinned his brother beneath him. He launched fully into his mind while Sebastian growled and cursed and swore to end him in brutal ways, but Ean hardly heard him now for the whipping wind and the roaring of elae in his ears.

  Ean spun his mind around Dore’s matrix, memorizing it for Dareios’s later inspection and study, but as he began a second pass in search of that fifth-strand pattern of binding, he spotted a distant pattern disconnected from the primary compulsion. Like a thread caught upon a thorn, only a tiny bit of it fluttered free of the blackness hiding it. Ean latched onto this thread with alacrity. It took but the breath of a thought to begin its unraveling.

  Beneath him, Sebastian stilled abruptly.

  Thinking little of the thread he’d pulled, Ean sought again the pattern of the fifth that held t
he matrix together. Deep he pushed his mind into his brother’s captive consciousness, fast he sent his mental gaze swirling in and out of the matrix. So engrossed was he that when Sebastian began writhing beneath him, Ean hardly registered his outcry. Yet no matter how deeply he probed, how many singular paths he followed—tracing each and every pattern in the matrix from beginning to end—Ean couldn’t find the only pattern he truly sought.

  Some part of him heard others shouting, but he was so intent. He knew he had to be close to finding it! So he pushed harder. His intention became a spear working its way deeper into the meat of Sebastian’s consciousness, until—

  A tidal force repelled Ean from Sebastian’s mind and likewise propelled his body into the air. Ean flipped head over heels and landed in a backwards sprawl on a cushion of the fifth, his head just inches from the stone steps, stunned nearly to the point of blacking out.

  It took many seconds to right himself. As his breath returned and he realized he was still floating in midair, he shook off his daze and blinked to focus on the form of Isabel across the court. She stood with one palm facing him and her staff pointed at the marble beneath his back, holding him just shy of disaster while the storm’s rising wind tore at her clothing.

  Then the truth finally registered. A sick feeling beset Ean, and he looked to his eldest brother to find him curled in a fetal ball in the damp sand.

  ***

  Some part of Sebastian was aware enough to realize that Dore’s compulsion felt different now. Since last he’d faced Ean in combat, his brother had unworked a host of patterns binding his thoughts. He’d believed these patterns had bound only his memories, but he saw now even with what dim awareness he possessed that having those memories restored had also restored a part of himself.

  This did not make it easier to resist Dore’s compulsion. Verily, resistance was impossible—his body would merely continue to comply despite any thoughts to the contrary. It was almost worse having this conscious awareness, watching as if a distant spectator, helpless while his body betrayed him, while traitorous hands sought his brother’s neck.

  The part of Sebastian that recalled himself recognized Ean’s presence in his mind, even as it realized the absence of the usual necrotic taint that was Dore’s awareness, which forever tasted of bile. Then he remembered the goracrosta and felt a surge of gratitude for its bite—if only it had some ability to dull the compulsive entity now running his body. Alas, he watched himself attempt to capitalize on his brother’s misstep and force Ean to the ground, still just as helpless to stop this dramatization as Ean apparently was.

  Thunder sounded, and rain opened upon the world. Sebastian’s hands grew slippery, while the goracrosta’s icy sting intensified. The demon that had hold of his mind ignored this pain like it ignored everything else—everything but the command to slay Ean val Lorian and stand over his body until it grew cold in death.

  Then, the unthinkable: Ean slipped free of his grasp and dove for his hips. The real Sebastian watched with bated breath, hardly daring hope his brother could pin his demon-possessed body, yet in but a few swift moves, he’d done just that.

  Ean speared into his mind with fervor then, and though Sebastian felt this intrusion painfully, yet he welcomed it. The entity that had hold of his body scrambled and swore and promised a litany of painful deaths to his dear youngest brother, but Sebastian, lurking in the shadows of his own mind, held the anguished hope Ean would yet succeed.

  He felt Ean circling like a hawk in his mind, felt the heat of his inspection and his probing mental gaze, and then he felt Ean pause…and something else, like a sudden tugging at a loose thread. Sebastian tried to tell him to leave that thread alone—that it was knotted and hidden for a reason. Yet Ean worried at it until he had it firmly in his grasp, and then he pulled.

  Pain flared like the sun.

  For a moment Sebastian saw only vivid, agonizing light. Then the pattern of occlusion dissolved like a dam made of mud, and the floodgates of memory opened. Sebastian thought at first he was the water washing through his mind, for the rage on its rushing tide stole his breath. But as the water continued pouring forth in a deluge of vivid recall, Sebastian realized he was the dam being slowly unmade, his fragile foundations obliterated by the raging waters of true memory.

  And the story the waters brought back to him…

  Long Sebastian had believed that Dore bound him before leaving N’ghorra. As the first of his true memory returned, however, Sebastian saw this for a lie and understood—Dore wouldn’t have denied himself the joy he experienced in subjugating a free man to his will.

  But it was learning the way this had been done that so shattered Sebastian’s hold on reality. He experienced all over again the horror, the agony and the unparalleled shame of those early weeks of his bondage. For Dore had not merely bound him in those months of captivity, he had broken him.

  Delighting in every moment, he’d held Sebastian with straps of the fifth and raped him repeatedly; and while his phallus had thrust into Sebastian’s body, so had Dore thrust with similar violence into his mind, ravaging his memories and shuttering them away even as he pinned Sebastian’s young form beneath his cadaverous chest and marked him with his panting breath. Day after day, month after month, with every shuddering orgasm, Dore had laid a new pattern across Sebastian’s mind while his seed erupted into his body, so that he’d felt the man’s domination from soul to loins.

  Dore hadn’t stopped until Sebastian had no longer known who he was, until every vestige of himself had been scraped away, his mind as raw and bruised and bloody as his backside. And once Dore had broken the bones of Sebastian’s conviction, he’d sucked the mental marrow with a probing proboscis of the fourth while his tongue had spread an unhealthy film of saliva across Sebastian’s genitals.

  No words could convey the horror of this rape. Reliving all those months, re-experiencing that agony, even the sensory pain of it coming back in brutal force… Knowing now what had been done, it nearly broke Sebastian all over again. His soul screamed.

  The entity running Sebastian’s body cried out with the pain of these memories, but the little part of himself who remembered it too nearly, curled into a ball and willed itself into death.

  Thirty

  “What is bred in the bone will not leave the flesh.”

  –An old Nadori proverb

  Viernan hal’Jaitar made his way through the secret passages of the Shamshir’im feeling unnerved. He’d just left a meeting with his prince and the Prophet, and the latter’s allusions during their meeting had immensely unsettled him.

  Hal’Jaitar felt certain that the Prophet knew what had become of his pet truthreader Kjieran van Stone—and possibly Kedar and all the rest as well—while Viernan remained mired in the mystery. Too, the Prophet seemed to have some vendetta against him personally, which made Viernan fear what Bethamin had learned of Kjieran’s experiences in Tal’Shira.

  Had the truthreader told him of Viernan’s attempts to kill him?

  It chafed on the Consul that Bethamin’s spies might tread deeper paths among the realm’s secrets, or that Bethamin’s information network might extend further than Viernan’s own. Had the Prophet been merely mortal, the Consul might’ve handled this inconvenience in a multitude of ways. But the Prophet Bethamin wore his inhumanity in every motion, gesture and turn of his gaze, and hal’Jaitar would’ve been a fool not to fear him—or at least not to fear the power he so indiscriminately wielded.

  The Consul misliked uncertainty in dealing with an enemy.

  He clearly didn’t understand enough of Bethamin’s origins, but he sensed that attempting to learn more would elevate their mutual disregard to open conflict. The kingdom would suffer then—or rather, Radov’s rule and the power this offered hal’Jaitar would suffer—so he dared not provoke the man.

  But it infuriated him no end to dangle at the Prophet’s mercy.

  Reaching the Shamshir’im compound, he swept inside his offices to find another unwelco
me guest.

  “Father.” Taliah rose from her chair.

  Of course she wore that harlot’s gown. In exchange for a king’s ransom, the Vestian Sorceresy had promised to make a wielder of his useless daughter but had returned a whore in her place—Huhktu’s ashen bones, he despised those damnable witches.

  He seated himself behind his desk and speared Taliah with a scrutinizing gaze. She might at least properly clothe herself in the presence of her own father, but she’d traded honor for a witch’s gimlet eye and unpropitious power. “You have news of the prince?”

  “Yes, father.” She crossed her arms self-consciously across her chest and dropped her gaze. “I’ve assembled all of the pieces of his past.”

  He sat back in his chair. “Very well. Proceed.”

  So she began.

  While Taliah spoke of early truths he already knew, hal’Jaitar ruminated on the ill manner in which she’d gained this information.

  An inquisitor exhibited a clean sort of honor in bleeding a man for his secrets with iron and steel and flame. Every man who stepped upon the field of battle expected this end should he fall into enemy hands. Since time immemorial, men had used coarse and bloody torments to wage a hard form of justice—intemerate justice, inasmuch as both sides engaged in similar practices.

  But to wield elae as torture…hal’Jaitar found this a disgraceful affront to all wielders of proper training. Not that he wouldn’t resort to such means when circumstances required, only that he would never have sullied his own hands in the sordid practice.

  In any case, Taliah had gotten the entire fantastical tale from the recalcitrant prince, beginning with Naiadithine’s intervention in the Fire Sea and ending at last with the ambush that brought Trell finally back to M’Nador, full circle.

  Yet in having the full picture, hal’Jaitar felt only more disturbed. The prince was clearly favored not only of Naiadithine but also of the Emir’s Mage and his Sundragons.

  Dore’s Saldarians had reported a Sundragon tracking their party through the Kutsamak and all the way to Doane. Had he been, in fact, seeking Trell val Lorian?