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

by Melissa McPhail

  Vincenzé eyed him speculatively. “You don’t fit into any caste.” He resumed the thread of their earlier conversation as if they’d never left it. “You’re neither poor, nor the prickly son of a merchant prince, nor carrying titles or a noble’s standard; rather being sponsored by the High Lord Marius di L'Arlesé himself—who has never sponsored a student to the Sormitáge, not even his own progeny,” he added with an upraised finger and a pointed look, “—and therefore by extraction they suspect you more noble than their own elite and hate you for it. You skipped all the ranks up to the first ascension. You’re not Devoveré but neither are you Maritus, wearing instead the postulant’s band, announcing to everyone that you arrived here ready to test for your ring. They can’t even pigeon-hole you into one of the smaller outcast groups, for your Agasi is cultured, your coloring is fair, you’re clearly not a Wildling, or—Sanctos-forbid—a Dane. You simply don’t fit anywhere, Tanis.”

  You’re telling me, the lad inwardly sighed.

  And there lay the crux of the matter, the nagging suspicion that kept him up at night. Tanis believed he didn’t fit into any caste because he wasn’t meant to—because he’d come to the Sormitáge for some purpose other than learning. Yet what that purpose could possibly be…the mystery kept presenting itself for his inspection, but he had yet to find any answer.

  He missed Phaedor’s company, but even more, he missed the zanthyr’s guidance. At least when he’d followed Pelas into peril that sense of duty had grounded him. Here he just felt alone. Tanis knew Vincenzé intended well, that his words were meant to reassure him that he’d done nothing to deserve the treatment he’d received thus far, but having these truths presented to him only heightened his sense of isolation.

  He pushed back from the table. “I’d better be going, sir. Thank you for the meal.”

  Vincenzé cast him a tolerant look of farewell, but Tanis thought he might’ve caught a hint of pity within his gaze as well.

  Forty

  “Colleges hate geniuses as armies hate heroes.”

  – Liam van Ghellar, Endoge of the Sormitáge

  Tanis dreamed…

  He and his mother sat on a blanket among the daisies. Before them stretched a long hillside overlooking the sea. The sun shone strongly from the south, bathing them in warmth, while the breeze planted cool kisses across his hot skin.

  His mother wore a wide-brimmed hat, and her colorless eyes were in shadow, though a bit of sunlight dappled her chin as she smiled at him. He saw himself in her eyes—a towheaded toddler clothed in linen pajamas and tunic, hems worked with gold. Looking down, he saw his pudgy toddler legs strewn with the detritus of daisies.

  Knowing only happiness, Tanis’s little hand extended the pathetic corpse of one of his victims toward his mother. The yellow core held but a single white petal, itself somewhat mangled.

  His mother’s bright laughter made music with the crashing sea. She impulsively drew him onto her lap and enfolded him within her arms, so that they both gazed out at the cerulean sea. Tanis felt her chin resting upon his head, felt the cooling breeze and the shade of her hat and her soft arms protecting him.

  “Ah, Tanis love, we must be sure to enjoy these moments.” Tanis heard a wistful longing in her voice that he didn’t understand, an ache that seemed to refute her words. It warned of long years of emptiness and longer strains upon her heart, emotions his young ears were too innocent to interpret or comprehend.

  His mother stroked his hair as she continued quietly, contemplatively, “There will be times when our paths seem to stretch endlessly on. Though impatience would guide us differently, we must use those seemingly endless stretches as moments of respite, times we might ponder our own questions and explore our inner truth.”

  She squeezed him gently, and he snuggled closer to her. His mother always smelled of warmth.

  “You see, those are the times when Fate is not requiring greatness of us.” His mother’s voice seemed far away now, as if in her mind she was already exploring distant shores. “Let us not, however, be waylaid by such respite into thinking we are not still upon our path—and let no fears turn us from it—but let us have faith instead that when Fate requires our involvement again, He will present himself with action.”

  “Ma-ma,” Tanis said. He held up the flower to her again.

  She took it and gave him a kiss on his baby cheek. “My angel-heart,” she whispered, her breath a caress upon his ear. “I love you so...”

  Tanis woke still feeling the touch of his mother’s lips upon his cheek.

  He lay for a while, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness of his room. Dawn’s first light barely limned the edge of the curtains, and the chamber remained bathed in shadows. Somewhere in the depths of the room, Felix was snoring softly.

  Tanis climbed from his bed and dressed. Then he jogged down to the courtyard while the air was still crisp and started moving through the cortata sequence with the slow precision the zanthyr had ingrained in him.

  The Adept dance of swords was first and foremost a pattern, but one crafted with hands, arms and feet in synchronous motion with the mind. With or without sword in hand, it required concentration in the crafting—at least until its twists and turns became second nature. Tanis knew it instinctively now, but how well he’d be able to maintain it if he had to do it in an actual battle…? Well, he hoped he’d never need to use it, but the way the zanthyr had been talking…

  Whether Phaedor had intended his warnings in earnest or had meant only to scare Tanis into keeping up his daily practice, the outcome was the same. By the time the sun had risen above the campus trees and the university had come to life—the manicured paths beyond Chresten’s garden courtyard now flooding with people—Tanis had worked three times through the cortata. As he finished his last low-crouching turn and straightened, he happened to glance up.

  Felix was looking at him through the window of their third-floor room.

  Tanis smiled and raised a hand.

  Felix just stared at him coldly for a moment longer and then turned away.

  Tanis let out a slow breath and gazed with furrowed brow at the now empty window. His most earnest advances, his most innocuous hellos, had only resulted in the other boy viewing him with open distrust. Tanis had hoped that maybe they would end up in a lecture together, so at least they would have something in common to talk about, but Felix was Devoveré. He wasn’t required to attend lectures and had the freedom instead to pursue whatever path of higher learning most called to him.

  Yet, Tanis didn’t think Felix was upon a course of study—at least not one he could make any sense of. He never saw him carrying books or papers—not even journals for taking notes. Nor did Felix seem to keep to any particular schedule. When Tanis did catch a glimpse of the other boy around campus, he usually walked alone. Tanis thought surely they should’ve been compatriots for this reason if no other, for they both seemed isolated from the greater community. But Felix wanted nothing to do with him.

  Gazing up at their bedroom window, Tanis realized that most of the university’s students had long set off to greet the day’s adventures, and it finally occurred to him to wonder how Felix spent his time.

  When Tanis returned to his room, Felix was sitting at his desk hunched over a paper with pen in hand. Tanis only glimpsed a few lines of writing as he passed by—long lines of jumbled letters like some kind of incomprehensible code.

  Tanis walked to his wardrobe and opened the doors. “I thought I might attend a lecture Monseraut Greaves is giving today,” he offered with a glance at Felix, who remained intent upon his scribbling. Tanis took off his sweat-soaked tunic and donned a clean one. “Have you attended any of his lectures?”

  Felix hissed a curse and crumpled up the paper into a ball. He ducked his head and growled low over his shoulder, “I can’t concentrate when you’re talking to me.”

  Tanis noticed several identical balls of crumpled paper which Felix had already shoved to the side of his desk. “Is ther
e something I can help you with?”

  “No, Tanis—Sancto Spirito!—can’t you just leave me bloody enough alone?” Abruptly Felix scraped his chair back, grabbed his knapsack from the floor, shoved all the crumpled balls into it and stormed from the room.

  Tanis stared after him in surprise.

  When so many people view you with mistrust, the generality tends to obscure a more singular view. Otherwise it wouldn’t have taken Tanis so long to wonder what Felix might be trying to hide from him.

  But he was wondering now.

  Taking up his satchel, he set off after Felix, intensely curious of a sudden to know where he was going. Felix had already reached the end of the hallway when Tanis emerged from their room, so the lad had to jog to close the distance. He heard Felix storming rapidly down the mahogany staircase, and he gained the mezzanine landing just as Felix was crossing the atrium’s chequered floor towards the dining hall.

  Tanis ran to catch up. Felix noticed him following and upped his own pace. Tanis watched him shove through the line crowding the dining hall’s entrance, but by the time Tanis pushed between those same students who stood waiting for their turn at the buffet, Felix had vanished. Tanis stood in the portal gazing in frustration across the wide hall of tables crowded with heads, seeking one in particular.

  A tall truthreader twice his age scowled at Tanis. “You’re blocking the way, eh?”

  Tanis turned and noticed the Adept standing there holding four mugs precariously balanced, and he moved out of his path with a murmured apology. He cast one more disappointed look around the room, but Felix had well and truly vanished.

  There was nothing to be done for the day then but continue on with his intended plans, yet Tanis felt uncommonly disappointed, as if he’d missed a consequential opportunity.

  Since he’d nowhere to be until after midday, Tanis stood in line for his breakfast and then found a table near the corner. While he ate, he read his father’s journal. His father’s long-stroked script told a new tale that day:

  Lately, I’ve been having an ongoing and quite fascinating discussion with Benerio di Vangieri, one of the foremost Applied Patternists in the Sormitáge’s Department of Metaphysical Sciences. He’s spearheading research into reading the currents using fourth-strand truth patterns.

  Traditionally, the Seeings used to bring the currents into view are categorized in the Illusion band, but Benerio is using truth patterns as well. Combined, they elicit a resonance unlike anything I’ve experienced while reading the currents.

  Benerio is excited about my idea to layer his designs with my first-strand tracking patterns to create a singular pattern that reveals both truth and individuality of character—that is, to be able to see not only what was done but who did it. Once perfected, this pattern could be used to trace the workings of specific wielders from anywhere on the globe.

  I’ve also begun experimenting with a layered pattern using the fifth to reveal physical detail otherwise impossible to see, such as the outlines of rooms inside a building, or the chambers of a beating heart.

  This is the pattern so far…

  The next four pages contained patterns—one carefully penned diagram per page. It took Tanis several minutes of study to realize they weren’t four separate patterns but one pattern viewed from each of four angles.

  Of course!

  Tanis hadn’t realized it before, but he saw the logic now. Patterns weren’t two-dimensional—at least…well, most of them couldn’t have been only two-dimensional. The more complicated, the more forces they sought to compel and control, the more dimensions they would have to occupy.

  He thought about what his mother had told him of Patterning—how in order to wield a pattern, you first had to be able conceptualize it, to memorize it exactly. Then you had to be able to channel not merely elae but also your own intention into the pattern. This took practice, because it was quite a few things you had to conceptualize all at once.

  She’d tried to explain how Patterning was its own language, which Tanis more or less understood. Just as one learned how a number was a symbol representing a quantity, or how a word represented an idea, patterns had their own representation: a potent combination of intent, purpose and action.

  Tanis tried to envision his father’s pattern as it would appear in three dimensions. Moving from page to page, he layered each piece of the pattern upon the next in his mind’s eye, fitting the sides and angles and loops upon one another like a three-dimensional puzzle. As his mind traced every line and swirl, he wove the image into being.

  It wasn’t until the dining room went silent that Tanis looked up from his journal and received a shock. There, before him, hovered the pattern he’d been conceptualizing in his mind—he’d unwittingly crafted it as an illusion that everyone could see! The pattern glowed in an intricate, crystalline dodecahedron and cast refracted light on everyone nearby.

  Abruptly he released the illusion and buried his gaze in his book, red cheeks burning. He felt eyes lingering on him far longer than was comfortable, and a hum of murmuring continued even after the eyes moved on. Most discomfiting were the thoughts left unspoken which nonetheless reverberated around the room unevenly, reverberating back to Tanis’s perception. The general opinion seemed to be that Tanis was showing off.

  Feeling suddenly most unwelcome, the lad gathered his things and hastened out of Chresten Hall.

  Across campus, the lad walked with his eyes downcast. Shame sat heavily on his shoulders. Though it had been an honest mistake, a truthreader of his ability was expected to exhibit better control over his talent. The others were only justified in thinking ill of him.

  The morning’s losses had drained the shallow well of encouragement which Tanis’s dream of his mother had replenished. Now frustrations and uncertainties flowed in to fill the vacuum. Tanis had never felt so alone, nor so lonely for lack of company.

  Unable to push off the glum cloud that enshrouded him, Tanis let his feet find their own way across campus. He wandered for a while through the Grand Passáge, gazing up at the fantastical ceiling that stretched nearly half a mile, its length quartered by intersecting passages and gilded domes. At every corner, a marble sculpture fashioning some new creature erupted from the joining of walls. Sometimes fierce, often elaborate, each sculpture held an incomparable grandeur.

  After a while, Tanis turned down one of the intersecting hallways and at last emerged onto a wide quad. He sat on the steps for a while watching the ceaseless flow of bodies in and out of buildings and along each path. He saw robed maestros and peak-capped literatos, sometimes in close discussion but more often trailing a cloud of students; Bemothi and Nadori Adepts distinguishable from each other by the styling of their garments and the way each assiduously avoided the other; and golden-haired Danes viewing everyone with contempt. He saw Veneisean Adepts from Queen Indora’s Conscriptus wearing their sashes of bright tangerine, and myriad other races and nationalities in a never-ending flow. Every once in a while he would see the pearlescent robe of a Palmer passing like a star among the darker stream.

  He recalled the wonder he’d experienced while walking Cair Rethynnea’s Thoroughfare, how he’d been so amazed to see so many peoples from every walk of life. Yet the Sormitáge far surpassed even Rethynnea’s diversity.

  After a while, Tanis pushed to his feet and joined the flow, falling in a few paces behind a mob of young second-strand frites who were twittering with the latest gossip. Apparently it had come to light that the Order was investigating the Adept disappearances and that they’d begun questioning the maestros. This was quite the news. The young frites were all aflutter with speculation over who had been truthread and what other crimes the Order’s operatives may have uncovered.

  They were walking along a path bordered by towering maples just beginning to bud when the chattering frites turned between two statues and descended a mossy staircase set into the hillside. With nothing more important to do, Tanis followed them.

  At least a hundred g
ranite stairs ended at the wall of a massive amphitheater. The frites had all gone on through the columned entrance—Tanis heard the constant hum of their conversation echoing out of the interior—so he stayed on their trail, growing ever more curious about their destination.

  He emerged into daylight again in a stadium built to host thousands. The frites had descended to the first circle of rows and were gathering along the backless marble benches that framed its center—and what a center it was!

  Huge slabs of black and white marble formed the floor, which spanned at least two hundred feet. A maestro stood at the near edge of the chequerboard tiles with hands clasped before his grass-green robes. He waited with miraculous patience for the young Nodefinders to settle.

  Then he said: “Welcome, welcome. Are we all here? Very well, let us resume. For any who missed yesterday’s discussion, we’ve been covering the Unified Pattern. Now, as you have learned, second-strand Adepts use but a single pattern—intrinsic to our innate composition—to travel upon the Pattern of the World.”

  He raised his arm, palm out, and the air began to shimmer at the tips of his fingers. The shimmering rapidly expanded into the illusion of a pattern, golden and complex, which turned slowly on its axis. In the light of the pattern’s reflection, Tanis caught the glimmer of several Sormitáge rings on the maestro’s fingers.

  “This major pattern, called the Greater Reticulation, is constructed of fifty weld points,” the maestro continued then. “Each of these points branches into ten to twenty-five nodal connections called the Lesser Tessellations.”

  The illusion shifted. One point grew larger while the others faded. New golden strands branched from this singular point in pyramidal fashion, forming multiple icosahedrons. The maestro explained while the illusion rotated, “Each node hosts up to fifty-six ley lines within its matrix. Each ley line is capable of supporting twenty-four to the third power of leis.”