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

by Melissa McPhail

  The original illusion altered again, with the single node shrinking back to become merely one point among the greater pattern, whereupon the maestro said, “The interconnectedness of the entire geopolyhedron of the Greater Reticulation must become second-nature to a Nodefinder who hopes to reach the First Ascendancy and gain his Devoveré ring. You should all have begun charting the Greater Reticulation with Maestro Hunn in Extratellurian Cartography. See me after the lecture if you have not.”

  He dropped his arm, banishing the illusion, and walked to the forward edge of the tile he was standing on. “But the focus of today’s lecture is on using our pattern—not to travel upon this miraculous geometric matrix, for which none of you are ready—but upon our leis court, here.” And he motioned to the tiles spreading around his person.

  Casting a compelling stare around the assembled Nodefinders to first capture their gazes and their attention, the maestro took a big step to his right. Tanis saw the flash of a pattern in his mind’s eye, and the maestro appeared four squares to the left.

  The frites all let out a whoop of excitement.

  The maestro made a little bow, and the frites broke into mad applause.

  Tanis smiled from where he leaned against the tunnel’s archway. This maestro seemed experienced in handling such a young crowd of second-stranders, who were notoriously hard to corral.

  The maestro took a quick tour around the chequerboard court then, stepping hither and yon and vanishing and appearing randomly. The frites were all standing up and bubbling with excitement by the time he stepped off the court to let them have a go.

  Tanis smiled as the frites bounded and cavorted then, gleefully vanishing and reappearing, sometimes right on top of one another with bumps and tumbles and shrieks of laughter. The amphitheater soon echoed with delighted squealing and shouts of challenge.

  He’d heard a lot of talk about the ballgame called Quai—the observation and discussion of which was a favorite pastime for most Sormitáge residents—but until Tanis saw the frites bouncing from square to square, he hadn’t realized this was the amphitheater where they played Quai each week. Every Hall had its own Quai champion, and a student could win or lose an entire month’s tuition gambling on a single game.

  Tanis watched the frites until the Nodefinders’ repetitively flashing pattern was bombarding his consciousness with relentless repetition, whereupon he took his leave. As he climbed the steps, he noticed the maestro watching him with a tense gaze.

  ***

  That afternoon, the Imperial Historian Monseraut Greaves gave a lecture on the origins of the Empire. Sitting in the back of the crowded lecture hall, Tanis listened raptly as the historian spoke of the Age of Fable and the times known as the Before, when chaos ruled Alorin with an iron fist.

  It surprised the lad to learn that Adepts of those times knew nothing of the Sobra I’ternin or even of the strands of elae—that this knowledge came much later in the world’s collective history. He found it startling to hear that even today, some kingdoms of the realm—and many in far eastern Avatar—refused to acknowledge the Sobra’s truth and clung instead to the practices of a darker age.

  Tanis thought immediately of Pelas’s Fhorgs and their staunch belief in blood magic, which seemed naught but gruesome ceremony and superstition to the lad, yet which he’d seen them cling to with fervent faith.

  But when the maestro started talking about the Quorum of the Sixth Truth, Tanis really got interested.

  “The Quorum were a fraternity of fifth-strand Adepts in Cyrenaic times, which we Agasi call the Before,” the maestro lectured. “They thrived for centuries in times when no one even knew of the Sobra I’ternin, long before we had any codified structure like what you find in Adept life today.”

  He held his glasses away from his face as if to ascertain their clarity and then resettled them upon his long nose. “The Quorum weren’t using the same nomenclature as what we use now,” he told the room then, “but from what we can piece together from their recovered writings, they spent decades—centuries even—researching variant traits, cataloguing what each trait could do and exploring ways to pursue them.”

  A student in the front raised his hand. “What do you mean ‘pursue’ them, Maestro?”

  The historian arched a bushy salt and pepper eyebrow. “I mean they were experimenting with impregnation and controlled breeding programs designed to produce specific variant traits in children.”

  A startled hum passed through the room at this.

  “Yes…” the historian noted the collective reaction. “Not something you would see today. But you must understand the circumstances in those times. Without the Sobra’s guidance, everything we knew about elae came from the Quorum’s research. Their knowledge was limited mainly to fifth-strand endeavors, yet they were the recognized experts the world over in matters of the arcane, and they were much sought after for their skills.”

  He turned and began pacing the room, hands clasped behind his back, letting his ample belly lead the way. “Those were darker times,” he said with a frown. “Even so—can any of you imagine an organization of hundreds of fifth-strand adepts? Perhaps thousands? When today we strain to find even a handful born to that elusive strand?” He cast a telling look across the silent room.

  Another hand raised, another question. “What happened to the Quorum, Maestro?”

  He opened palms. “They broke apart. No one is sure what happened. Much of their documentation was lost in the cataclysm that shook the world five millennia ago—an event that most of you know as Cephrael’s Blight. We have reason to think, however, that the Quorum may have caused this cataclysm, which nearly wiped out all life in the realm and cast most of civilization back into barbarism.”

  He stopped behind the central table that held books and other papers and rested a hand on its edge, as if the strenuous pacing had tired him. “It took another twenty-five hundred years to climb out of that uncivilized pit. It wasn’t until Hallian the First came out of a cave carrying the book he claimed Cephrael put directly into his hands that civilization and the adept gifts were truly restored.

  “It was the Fourth Age of Fable into which Hallian emerged. It was a vicious time. Adepts lived hidden, in fear for their lives from the vindictive efforts of superstitious, bigoted men. The realm endured constant invasion—Warlocks from the Shadow Realms were a considerable threat, and kings employed zanthyrs to protect their holdings. It was a time of witches, mystics, demon sorcery and blood magic—which the Fhorgs of Myacene practice to this day. A dark time. No one understood elae and the Adept gifts or how to properly use them. We had no codification, only a vast panoply of practices based on conjecture and superstition, or upon the specious results of brutal experimentation.”

  “Maestro,” another student asked, “what about Illume Belliel’s Council of Realms? Did they not have jurisdiction in those times?”

  The historian took off his spectacles again and cleaned them with a handkerchief. “The earliest record we have of the Council of Realms comes from a recounting of Björn van Gelderan’s, when he braved the welds and their host of dangers to ultimately reach Illume Belliel.”

  He put his glasses back on and cast the room a grave look. “If not for the Fifth Vestal, we Adepts might still be fighting for the right to live free.”

  “I thought Emperor Hallian, not Björn, was the civilizing influence,” someone said. The contempt in his tone came through loud and clear.

  The historian eyed this student irritably. Tanis scanned the heads in the crowd, but he couldn’t tell who the maestro was scowling at.

  “We owe a great debt to Hallian the First,” Monseraut agreed, though his tone contained a disdainful edge, implying the student’s obvious lack of understanding as well as his ill manners.

  “So Hallian comes out of his cave carrying the Sobra I’ternin and begins translating, teaching, codifying,” the maestro continued. “He was the first translator of the sacred text—given the key to the understanding of
its patterns by whoever put the document in his hands.”

  “I thought it was Cephrael,” the same student remarked.

  “And so it is widely believed—believed being the operative word, Eddard d’Ardenne,” Monseraut added with a scowl at the Veneisean boy, whom Tanis still couldn’t see, “by which one must infer that there exists a lack of sufficient proof to fully explain either Hallian’s acquisition of the text or his initial attempts at translation.” He huffed testily, muttered something that sounded indignant, and speared a beady gaze back into the audience. “Hallian used the Sobra’s truths to drive the wild Varangians from his lands. With iron and blood and steel, he tamed the barbarism of the Fourth Age of Fable and ushered in the Fifth Age of Reason. Hallian’s descendants are now the ruling elite of Agasan.”

  After the lecture, Tanis was feeling a bit aimless, so he found a bench in a quiet cloister and resumed reading his father’s journal.

  In recent entries, his father had been expounding on the Laws of Patterning and comparing them to the Esoterics. Tanis didn’t always follow his father’s reasoning, for he lacked the education necessary to achieve full understanding and application of these abstruse laws. Yet the ideas alone sparked new worlds of thought.

  That day, Tanis read:

  It amazes me how two men can interpret the First Law of Patterning so differently. My master knows that ‘a wielder is limited by what he can envision,’ but he thinks of this law only in terms of how to combine and wield patterns. He sermonizes endlessly that two wielders, if left to themselves, might wield the same pattern for different purposes.

  This is all fine, but I think he’s entirely missing the point. I say patterns be damned—the only thing limiting a wielder is his imagination.

  I would sometimes that none of us studied, for we only inherit the limitations of our teachers—in this regard, my master is correct. Teachers pass on their failures as much as their wisdom, a litany of things never to try because they ‘cannot’ be done.

  Even when an instructor allows a student to attempt some new feat, the attempt remains tainted by the instructor’s own dubiousness. This doubt colors the student’s ability because it limits his imagination. He becomes the canvas bearing the dark marks of each instructor’s doubt, marks that become chains binding him to mediocrity.

  It might be most efficacious to give an Adept one fundamental and let him extrapolate the rest, especially among the more brilliant minds. The Adept of a particular strand has the ability to think in concepts. If he has one fundamental, he can jump to a plethora of new advances. Whereas if you teach him things, it restricts him to the parameters of what he’s been taught.

  Yet a student cannot be limited by what he doesn’t know he can’t do. Better he go and try and see for himself instead of never trying. The failures of one do not universally apply to all.

  For some reason, these words made Tanis feel better about being able to timeweave. Perhaps his talent wasn’t one most people knew about, or talked about, but that didn’t necessarily make it unnatural—as he’d been thinking of it—just…unusual. In his father’s view, that would probably make it a good thing.

  As he was pondering this idea, Tanis noticed a mass of people flooding into a lecture hall across the quad, so he joined them to see what was going on.

  The lecture was well under way by the time Tanis made it into the hall, which offered standing room only. On stage stood a tall man dressed from head to toe in the silken garments of a Holy Palmer. Tanis recognized the same literato that Vincenzé had pointed out to him the other day, though he no longer carried his blade.

  The literato was lecturing on a pattern that glowed in the center of the room. Three-dimensional, the illusion slowly rotated on its axis, showing all of the facets of the oddly irregular diagram, which disturbed Tanis on a fundamental level. It was all sharp edges where it should’ve been smooth and thorny barbs where you’d expect it to curve. It looked like someone had taken a rosebush and twisted it into knots. The literato was indicating parts of it here and there with a gilded pointer.

  Something about the pattern hurt the back of Tanis’s eyes. It was almost like he couldn’t look directly at it but could only view its reflection, as if it had to pass through the lens and bounce off the back of his eyeball first. He blinked several times, but it didn’t lessen the uncomfortable effect.

  “As you can see,” the literato said in a voice that was both deep and melodious, the kind of voice you simply felt compelled to listen to, “the connectivity of the integral quatrefoils follows the expectations of the Third Law…”

  The literato was explaining the pattern’s purpose and use, but he might as well have been speaking Fhorg for all Tanis could understand him. The rows of scholars in the front apparently followed his talk, however, for even then one raised his quill to note, “But it seems to violate the First Esoteric, Literato N’abranaacht.”

  “Indeed, Maestro di Relisi,” the literato admitted with a polite bow of acknowledgement, “for as you have noted, it does not within its design give us any indication of how to apply it toward Absolute Being. Yet lest we forget the Twelfth Law, the pattern need not be perfect, but the wielder’s concept of it must be.”

  “But what’s it meant to do?” a woman near Tanis whispered to the man standing beside her. They both wore Devoveré rings and looked about twenty and five, but Tanis wouldn’t have made a bet on their true age.

  “That’s the incredible part,” the man murmured in reply. He had a long, aristocratic nose and raven hair and reminded Tanis somewhat of the High Lord. “He’s saying it has the potential to Awaken an Adept even after the window of adolescence has closed.”

  She drew in her breath with a little gasp.

  “But it’s clearly a dark pattern,” the man continued with his brown eyes pinned on the illusion in question. “Dangerous. That’s why you see all the Sobra Scholars in the first row. They’re here to ascertain if the pattern can be trusted enough to experiment with it.”

  “A dark pattern.” She gave a little nervous laugh. “You mean like a mor’alir pattern?”

  “Be silent!” a balding literato standing beside them hissed with a glare. He pushed forward through the crowd to distance himself from them.

  The man replied in a low voice, ignoring the huffy literato. “Mor’alir Adepts don’t necessarily work dark patterns; mostly they work hal’alir patterns repurposed to destructive ends. You’ll never hear of actual dark patterns unless you entertain an Arcane Scholar. Dark patterns are all they ever talk about.”

  “But why do they call them dark if they’re not referencing the mor’alir path?”

  After a round of shushes from others nearby, the man took the woman by the elbow and moved them out of the press of bodies, closer to the doors. Tanis followed, intrigued to hear the man’s explanation.

  “The actual term is inverteré,” the man said then. “The slang term of ‘dark’ comes from the aspect of these patterns’ function, which is akin to a shadow. Dark patterns sort of twist elae inside out. They corrupt it somehow. No one is sure why, even now, even with all the Sobra has taught us about the lifeforce. The Sobra Scholars believe such patterns cause elae to mirror itself, triggering refractions which injure the strand’s integrity. We don’t use them—and the Sormitáge doesn’t teach them—because their results are unpredictable.”

  The woman looked back to the lecturing literato and inched up on her tiptoes to see over the heads of those in front of her. Then she settled back on her heels and frowned. “Marten, who would dare use a dark pattern to try to Awaken someone? If what you said about them is true…”

  He gave her a telling look. “If you thought you were an Adept long past your Awakening, wouldn’t you go to any lengths to try to find your gift?”

  She looked faintly horrified. Well, Tanis felt the same.

  The man and woman left, and Tanis turned back to the lecture, unsettled by what he’d heard.

  As he was making his way through
the wall of people to find a clear view again, he spotted Felix across the crowd, standing next to a girl wearing lavender spectacles. She wore her dark hair collected into loose, looping braids in a style preferred by provincial noble families. Tanis believed the hairstyle had been invented for the specific purpose of ensuring such girls remained free of suitors.

  No sooner did Tanis notice Felix than the latter looked over, noticed Tanis watching, and gave him a cold stare in return. Seconds later, the room broke into applause. Tanis glanced to the stage to find the literato bowing, and then everyone was up from their seats and a wave of people were pushing him toward the doors.

  With some creative maneuvering, Tanis managed to keep his eyes on Felix and the girl, but by the time he cleared the line snaking out, they were far down the passage and about to turn the corner. Tanis shoved through a group of Maritus students in front of him—making no friends in the moment—and ran after Felix and the girl.

  He saw them turn another corner, but by the time he reached the same corridor, the passage stood empty. Tanis rushed down it anyway, hoping to stumble upon them again, or at least catch a snippet of conversation to lead him in the right direction, but after taking several turns just on instinct, he found himself quite alone amid a warren of narrow halls. He wandered for an uncomfortable length of time, then trying to find his way back to the main passage, cursing Felix all the while.

  Eventually he heard male voices approaching, and soon two men rounded a corner.

  The first he recognized instantly as the Literato N’abranaacht—the man was, after all, quite unmistakable with his tall build beneath the flowing pearlescent robes. He’d donned his sword again, and this time Tanis was close enough to see etched silver patterns inscribed in the black leather baldric strapped across his chest.