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

by Melissa McPhail

  And everyone knew when you had dangerous information to sell, only one man in Tal’Shira could be trusted to buy it.

  Hafiz rounded a corner and came to a sudden halt, for there before him stood the infamous blue-lacquered doors.

  ‘You knock once and once again, and you enter, and you kneel, and you wait.’

  These were the instructions for contacting Thrace Weyland.

  Simple enough, yet Hafiz hesitated. He looked over both shoulders. He wetted his lips, spread his fingers and then clenched them into fists at his sides.

  Every Talien Knight, every soldier, and every spy in the princedom wanted to personally present Thrace Weyland’s head to Viernan hal’Jaitar. Countless bounty-hunters were after him. Mercenaries, too. Rumor even had it a zanthyr hunted for him. Hal’Jaitar had promised that whosoever removed Weyland’s head from his shoulders would be copiously rewarded from this life into the afterlife.

  Yet for all the people hunting him, for all those who knew his name, no one had ever been found who had actually seen Thrace Weyland. Even those who were rumored to have dealt with him couldn’t say they’d laid eyes on the man himself. It was most mysterious.

  Of course, a wise man didn’t actually go about claiming to have sold secrets to Weyland—not if he long wanted his head to remain attached to his body. But rumors were like mist. They had no clear source, nothing stopped them from spreading, and only the sun of truth could evaporate them.

  Hafiz stared at the blue-lacquered doors like they were a rearing viper splaying its hood. Finally he wiped sweating palms on his stained shirt, shook out his hands, and then knocked once and once again.

  One of the doors swung silently inward.

  Hafiz poked his head through the opening and then moved on inside. He passed through a dim room full of empty crates into a parlor hazed by apple-scented smoke. Cushions of various colors and fabrics were scattered across the layered rugs that covered the earthen floor. Finely woven tapestries decorated three of the room’s walls, while a wine-hued curtain draped the fourth. Several large alabaster urns lined that wall as well.

  And in one corner beneath a patterned awning, an old Nadori man sat cross-legged and puffing on a hookah.

  Hafiz looked around the room. Then he looked at the old man again. The latter hardly seemed more than an old beggar, the kind that hung about the markets making foul jokes to ruff up a man’s pride while a gamin crew of pickpockets robbed him blind. The old man’s skin was as dark and leathery as a shoe too many times repaired. Sprigs of shorn white hair stood out from his knobby skull like bristly sea grass. He appeared so ancient that even parts of his beard had abandoned him.

  “Ye one of them’s as come to kneel and wait?”

  Hafiz started at the old man’s voice. “Y-yes.” He wiped his palms on his shirt again. “That is, yes.”

  The old man gestured towards a cushion with the mouthpiece of his pipe. “Might as well sit down. Last one was wait’n a while.”

  Hafiz sat.

  The old man puffed on his hookah and watched Hafiz with the milk-white eyes of the nearly blind. After an immensely uncomfortable silence, during which time Hafiz began to worry that the old man was reading his mind, or assessing his future, or otherwise casting some ill-conceived curse upon his house, Hafiz said, “Do I just…wait here?”

  The old man took a long draw on his pipe. “Ye knock once and once again, and ye enter, and ye kneel, and ye wait.” He quoted the custom in his dry, raspy voice. Then he cackled. “But you ain’t kneeling, is ye?”

  Hafiz abruptly shifted to kneel on the cushion.

  The old man harrumphed. “So…ye buyin’ or sellin’?”

  Hafiz pushed hands against his knees and regarded the old man uncertainly. He was beginning to suspect the stranger was Weyland’s agent, as unlikely a candidate as he appeared. “I’m…selling.”

  The old man cackled again. “Better be juicy.” He puffed on his hookah. “He don’t pay silver for rumors and smoke, and ye take yer life in yer hands wastin’ his time.”

  “I saw this with…my own eyes.” Hafiz dropped his gaze as guilt made a fist in his chest. He’d done nothing when it happened, but he was doing something now.

  The old man puffed on his hookah, and the silence lingered and lengthened. Pipe haze filtered lazily across the room, teasing Hafiz’s nose, blurring his vision. Long tendrils of smoke curled and unfurled like snakes. Hafiz began to see shapes in their motion, stories unfolding…

  “…What?” whispered the old man. His voice barely disturbed the nearly hypnotic silence. “…What did ye see?”

  “…A prince.” Suddenly Hafiz shook his head to clear the haze from his thoughts. He blinked. Then he narrowed his gaze suspiciously.

  The old man looked unimpressed. “Lots of princes in M’Nador.” He puffed on his pipe.

  “This one wasn’t Nadori, but he spoke our tongue.” Rumors of a missing northern prince who spoke the desert tongue had been circulating the docks for weeks. Every sailor knew Thrace Weyland would pay for word of him.

  The old man set to hacking and coughing and finally hawked up a lump of phlegm, which he spat into a copper urn. He returned to puffing on his hookah and eyed Hafiz shrewdly through the haze. “Yeh? Must’ve been Kandori. Lots of princes in Kandori, too.” He gummed his mouthpiece from the left side of his mouth to the right. “Where’d ye see him?”

  Hafiz swallowed. “Darroyhan.”

  The old man removed the pipe from his mouth. He stared for a moment at Hafiz. Then he replaced the mouthpiece between his gums and set to puffing again. “I know who ye think ye saw…but speaking our tongue is no proof.”

  “I’ve heard the rumors.”

  “Ha!” The old man spat. “Everyone’s heard the rumors. He wants them to hear the rumors. How else will people learn what he’ll pay to know? Nyeh.” He gestured with the pipe again, pointing it at Hafiz. “Speaking our tongue is no proof.”

  “They killed my uncle!”

  The words left his tongue haphazardly, both a curse and a confession. He clapped a hand over his mouth and begged the gods to forgive him.

  The old man looked him over circumspectly. “Go on then. Let’s hear this story.”

  Hafiz pressed palms together and murmured a silent prayer to Huhktu, asking the God of Bones to look kindly upon his uncle in the afterlife.

  Then he pushed hands to his knees and told the old man his tale. His voice broke when he spoke of casting his uncle’s dead body overboard, of offering his bones to the sea. “I prayed to Inithiya to take his spirit,” he hastened to add, as if the old man sat in judgment on his piety, “and I prayed to Naiadithine to give him a place in her court.”

  The old man scrunched his rubbery upper lip nearly into his nose as he peered at Hafiz. He gestured with the mouthpiece of his pipe again. “Why do ye think they let ye go, if’n ye really saw who ye saw?”

  “There are rumors enough about Darroyhan already. Few captains willingly sail there.”

  “Rumors are good for a sailor’s business. More rumors, more money.”

  “Hal’Jaitar pays for the distance from port to port, not for the bravery it takes to get there.”

  The old man spat at Viernan’s name. “Ye think they meant to kill ye then?”

  Hafiz nodded. “I worried they would take me as soon as I made it back to port. So I waited until I had the tide. Then I secured my rudder on a seaward course, dove overboard and swam the two miles to shore. My cousin smuggled me in through the city gates, and I spent my last copper seeking…well…you.”

  “Me,” the old man snickered through toothless gums. “I ain’t him. But he’ll hear this news and pay ye well for it.”

  Hafiz exhaled a cry of relief. He might’ve wept had he not already forsaken so much of his honor that day.

  The old man arched a wispy white brow. “Ye got a family?”

  Hafiz nodded. “In Minara.” It was the harbor town south of Tal’Shira where he’d been raised.

 
The old man motioned with a bony finger towards the alabaster urns. “See that ‘un with a camel on the front? Open it up and take out what ye find.”

  Hafiz cast a curious glance to the urns. Then he stood and did as he’d been bidden. Reaching deeply inside the largest urn, his fingers met with a velvet bag. It felt heavy when he lifted it. Very heavy. Hafiz drew it out and turned to the old man.

  “Well? What ye wait’n for? Open it.”

  Hafiz untied the cord and looked inside. Then he blinked and pulled the bag wider. His mouth fell open.

  “Best get yer family out of M’Nador, Hafiz of Minara.” The old man puffed on his hookah. “I’d head out while the Ruby Road still holds true and a man can travel unmolested into the west.”

  Hafiz hastily retied the bag and shoved it inside his shirt. “Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.”

  “Don’t delay.”

  “No. I won’t delay.”

  The old man frowned at him. “Well—get off with ye!”

  Hafiz fled, but he kept his hand across his heart. Across his heart…and across the fortune in Agasi silver pressed beneath it.

  ***

  Thrace Weyland watched the sailor Hafiz run out and then fell back against his pillows. He let out an explosive breath. As the outer door closed with a click audible only to his ears, he dropped the illusion of the old man. The hookah pipe fell from a mouth slack with surprise. Then he launched to his feet.

  By Cephrael’s Great Book!

  Thrace swept aside the drapery, worked a trace seal upon the door it concealed, and hurried down the tunnel behind it.

  When he emerged from a door at the other end, he looked like a boy of fifteen with a truthreader’s colorless eyes.

  It was one of life’s little ironies that illusions came so naturally to truthreaders, that those most capable of finding and speaking truth were so equally capable of concealing it from others.

  Not that crafting believable illusions was simple. Like any talent, it had to be cultivated, the required skills honed, and a repertoire of characters studied, collected and exhaustively mimicked. One couldn’t simply throw on another man’s face and expect others to believe it, no matter how closely this borrowed visage resembled the other man’s. Mannerisms, accents, speech patterns, the way a man walked or laughed, even which curses he used…all of these traits had to be imitated for the illusion to hold true, for it to be widely and uniformly believed.

  Thrace Weyland was an accomplished illusionist, and this skill had kept him alive in one of the most cutthroat cities in the realm.

  Of course, being able to read a man’s thoughts helped, especially when he was coming towards you in a dark alley. And no amount of lurking in another’s man’s head obviated using your own wits—as a case in point, Thrace Weyland certainly wasn’t his real name. Truthreaders unequivocally made the best spies, a fact Raine D’Lacourte and his Brotherhood of the Seven Swords could well attest to.

  Historians liked to hold up fifth-stranders as the most powerful Adepts—mainly because Malachai had made such a mess of things—but when one looked at all the skills that came naturally to truthreaders—illusion-crafting, mind-reading, telepathy, and harvesting the combined energy of thought to foment wicked explosions—really, who needed the fifth?

  Thrace didn’t blame Radov and Viernan hal’Jaitar for hating truthreaders. The whole ‘he can’t lie, he’s a truthreader’ colloquialism ironically failed to illuminate the truth. No one knew better than a son of the fourth strand how easily a man could learn to lie—by substituting one question for another, by deliberate misinterpretation, by offering different information than what was requested, neither providing an answer nor telling a lie.

  A truthreader who didn’t learn such doublespeak wasn’t long for this world. A man who could say only exactly what was tripped haplessly into a multitude of social faux pas: the duchess who expected compliments where criticism would’ve been better suited; the prince used to fawning flattery no matter his repellant manners; the lord who wanted his indiscretions kept discreet; or the king with an eye for another’s lands.

  When you could read a man’s thoughts as easily as his expression, learning to slip around the truth wasn’t duplicity. It was survival.

  Thrace ducked into a basket-weaver’s stall in the Souk Marmadii and waved to the owner as he passed through. When he emerged on the other side, he was a fat, bearded merchant who walked with a limp. He hailed a pedicab and paid the boy five reale to take him to the palace.

  Long before the cab reached its destination, Thrace had moved on again, but before the night was through, he’d sold the news to operatives from five intelligence agencies and penned a letter to the man he personally served.

  The First Lord would’ve paid him more than all of the rest combined, but as Thrace placed the letter in the hands of the one who would deliver it, the promise of Björn van Gelderan’s thanks was payment enough.

  They’d found Trell val Lorian at last.

  Thirty-Seven

  “Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten—a bloody fool.”

  – The royal cousin Fynnlar val Lorian

  Rhys val Kincaid, Captain of the King’s Own Guard, knew he was dying. Every breath he drew felt like knives in his lungs. Moving required more effort than he could summon, since the greedy cough that was ravaging his chest stole most of his energy for its bidding. He’d walked out of Tyr’kharta and into the fortress of Ivarnen, but now it was all he could do to lie still. The illness denied him breath and sleep equally, such that he would stare for hours unending at the stones of his cell, coughing with every inhalation, wishing Death would make up his mind.

  The others had watched him helplessly—Brody, Cayal and Dorin. They’d given him the mold-eaten straw pallet and themselves slept on the filthy stones and regretted every day that this was the most they could do for their captain.

  In the beginning, defiance and hope had buoyed them all. While the wielder called Işak had held them in Tyr’kharta, they’d still believed Prince Trell would somehow escape and come for them. Brody had whispered stories of Fynn’s exploits and filled the men’s heads with such talk that they’d been sure the royal cousin would appear any hour, despite the grievous wounds he’d sustained before they parted ways in the Kutsamak.

  Then, when they’d learned they were being held as a lure for Prince Ean—Prince Ean! Who’d risen as if from the dead and vanished into thin air…or if the zanthyr was to be believed, across a node to T’khendar, which in Rhys’s view amounted to the same thing—the men had spoken with pride and wonder. They’d known it was only a matter of time before they were freed.

  But then the wielder Işak had come to see Rhys in his cell, and everything had changed.

  That was the moment Rhys forsook his honor. That was the moment he gave illness reign, for he’d compromised the only thing he truly had to protect himself in those dungeons.

  I should’ve told him!

  He’d recognized his prince. There was no getting around it. He’d recognized his voice from the beginning, but he’d told himself…he’d told himself Prince Sebastian was dead—he had to be, for what other alternative explained his eight-year absence?

  Oh, there were many gruesome explanations, when Rhys later thought upon them…afterwards, when it was too late. Then he’d finally summoned the courage to consider where Prince Sebastian might’ve been all those years. Every answer he landed on made him cold inside.

  What tortures his prince must’ve undergone! What horrendous forges they would’ve needed to melt down King Gydryn’s shining firstborn and reforge him into the ignoble man called Işak’getirmek.

  Ignoble…

  No. Prince Sebastian carried no ignobility—not any more. Too well Rhys recalled the moment the man had come to him in his cell, so obviously devastated and seeking understanding…not even knowing his own face. In that one brief meeting when Rhys might’ve helped him, instead, he had denied his prince.

  Whatever his prince had done,
whatever had been done to him…as far as Rhys was concerned, he carried no shame, for Rhys claimed it all as his own.

  Rhys stared at the ceiling and labored to breathe and wondered if this day would be the day he died.

  Three times he’d failed his king by failing to protect his sons: Ean in Rethynnea, Trell in the Kutsamak, Sebastian in Tyr’kharta. This was why the illness had found purchase in his body—why he regretted the deference the men had continued to pay to him. He would rather have died than live with the shame of these failures.

  His one grace…the one blessing he could find in any of it, was that where he’d failed, Prince Ean had not. Rhys hadn’t known at the time why they’d fled Tyr’kharta in the night. Now he did.

  Prince Ean had come for them at Tyr’kharta. He’d come for them, but he’d found a lost brother instead. Prince Ean would’ve recognized his brother; and unlike himself, Prince Ean would’ve had the courage to do whatever he must to save him. Rhys had no doubt in his mind this was what had occurred.

  The captain smiled in the darkness of his cell.

  Prince Ean…how reckless he was. How utterly incautious with his life. But he’d always been so. And Prince Sebastian…their Majesties’ firstborn had been ready to lead nearly since he was old enough to walk…as careful and considering of his actions as Ean was devil-may-care.

  A memory of the princes came back to Rhys suddenly, a memory long lost—or perhaps buried beneath the tide of grief that had overwhelmed them all upon learning of Prince Sebastian’s death…his supposed death…

  Rhys and Prince Sebastian had been sparring in the palace’s practice yard. Rhys had seen over thirty winters and the prince barely seventeen, but the young man had mastered his sword forms and had the strength to carry off quick feints and fast advances. Oh, when they locked blades, it was no contest—Rhys easily overpowered him—but in the dance of swords, when footing and form was the sport of the day? Well, Rhys couldn’t let down his guard for even a moment or the prince would have him.