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

by Melissa McPhail

  And I will come, he thought happily. Only that time he was careful to keep the thought to himself.

  Forty-Six

  “A man need not seek his path, for his path will find him whether or not he wills it.”

  – Excerpted from Footsteps with our Gods, A Treatise on a Palmer’s Faith

  Tanis arrived back at Chresten Hall to a commotion outside his room. A green-robed maestro paced like a caged raccoon in front of Tanis and Felix’s door while another man, possibly his clerk, stood in the opening. Tanis slipped past him with a muttered apology but stopped just inside, arrested by what he saw.

  Two of the Sormitáge’s Regiment Guard were industriously searching their room while Felix stood in the corner looking sullen. His calico hair stood every which way, and his clothes were rumpled.

  Linens, clothing, Tanis’s practice swords, books and random shoes lay scattered across the floor. One guard was searching Felix’s desk. He was going through every drawer inspecting each item and showing it to the clerk. The other guard had upended Tanis’s feather mattress and was searching beneath it. Their armoires and bookshelves had already been ransacked.

  Finally the guard searching Tanis’s side of the room flipped his mattress back into place and turned to the clerk. “Well, that’s everything.”

  The maestro stuck his head into the room and glowered at Felix. “His knapsack! Check his knapsack! It must be there!”

  The guard approached Felix and held out his hand. “Well then, hand it over, Sarcova. Let’s have a look.”

  Casting the maestro a venomous glare, Felix shrugged the knapsack off his shoulder and thrust it wordlessly at the guard.

  The guard loosed the drawstring and opened the satchel, but he frowned as he peered inside. “What’s all this?”

  “What? What?” the maestro stuck his head further into the room. “What did you find?”

  The guard cast a curious look at Felix and extended the sack back to him. “Hold this while I have a look.”

  Felix glared blackly at him, but he held the knapsack open while the guard dug through the crumpled balls of paper stuffed tightly inside. The soldier pulled a few out, uncrinkled them and frowned at the long lines of letters filling every inch of space on each page. “There’s nothing here but wads of paper, Maestro,” he said after a moment. He turned an annoyed look at the scholar. “I think the lad’s telling the truth.”

  Felix flung a hand into the air. “Thank you.” He retied his knapsack and slung it back over his shoulder, looking vindicated.

  “This isn’t over, di Sarcova,” the maestro snarled while the two guards filed out, muttering to each other. “I caught you red-handed!”

  “Red-handed implies I had something in my hand,” Felix retorted icily, “which I patently did not.”

  “You—you were in my chambers! You’re a thief, and I intend to prove it!”

  “Good luck with that, Maestro.”

  The man’s face turned red as a beet. He stalked over and pushed his face nose to nose with Felix’s. “You think you’ve fooled me? I’ll have your head on a plate and your bloody ring too—and don’t even think about requesting admittance to the Guild!”

  Felix held his gaze, unflinching. “If I have such magical capabilities as you claimed to the guards, Maestro, why would I care about joining your stupid guild?”

  The man glared at him a moment longer. Then he spun on his heel and stalked from the room, shouting back, “The Endoge will hear of this!”

  Felix followed him to the door and called after him into the hall, which was filling with residents eager for gossip, “Thanks for the visit, Maestro Lommeur! So glad you stopped by to talk about your incontinence issues. Wish I could’ve been of more help!”

  He withdrew back inside and closed the door to the sound of snickering from the hallway. Then he turned a look to Tanis and frowned. “Sorry about…all this.” He waved a resigned hand about the room.

  “It’s fine, Felix.”

  “No, really.” Felix sank down into his chair, pushed elbows onto his desk and laid his forehead in his hands. “I’ll clean it up.”

  Tanis walked over to the papers the guard had let fall and retrieved them. Smoothing one, he looked it over. Long lines of letters streamed across the page. It reminded Tanis of the word puzzles he’d loved solving as a child, where he would search for hidden words within a jumble of nonsense letters. Tanis had been good at such puzzles, for his mind had easily seen and recognized patterns from the youngest of ages.

  As his eyes scanned the page in his hand, automatically searching for the patterns recognized in common words, his eye caught on an arrangement of letters altogether startling and far from common.

  He lowered the page and looked over at Felix, suddenly unsettled. “Felix…”

  The other boy turned and immediately noted the paper in Tanis’s hand. He scowled. “Sancto Spirito, Tanis.” He launched out of his chair and snatched the page away. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  Tanis stared at him. “Felix, where did you learn that name?”

  “What name? What are you talking about?”

  Tanis pointed to the letters written on the third line. “That name.”

  Felix glowered and shoved the page into his knapsack. “Stay out of this, Tanis.” He spun away, threw open the door and rushed down the hall, pushing roughly by the students still crowding the passage.

  Tanis went after him. He latched onto Felix’s mental signature again, and this time he didn’t care if the other boy knew that he followed.

  Felix stormed down three flights of stairs like all the demons of Shadow were chasing him. He burst through Chresten’s doors and down the steps and went flying across the yard into the night. Tanis sprinted after him.

  The boys were close in height, but Tanis had been diligent in keeping up his physical studies, and in the long stretch of open path he cut Felix’s lead in half. Felix sped past the university buildings, spearing through the darkness like he’d run this gauntlet a hundred times. He leaped a hedge, half-slid down a hill, and rammed through a set of double doors into a lecture hall whose windows were dark.

  The heavy doors slammed just as Tanis reached them, catching his elbow and shoulder with a sharp flare of pain. He shoved them open again and continued the chase, spotting Felix’s dim form just before the boy turned a corner.

  Tanis ground his feet into the tiles to propel himself as fast as possible. He grabbed the edge of the wall as he careened around it and headed down a long corridor lined in tapestries, which hung as darker shadows in the nearly lightless passage.

  “Felix, wait!”

  Just ahead, Felix paused in a spot of moonlight and turned a look over his shoulder. A twisted expression conveyed both triumph and anger. Then he turned and—

  A pattern flashed violently in Tanis’s mind, bringing him to a staggering halt. For an instant its brilliance blocked his vision—vivid and painful in its sharpness. When the lingering afterimage cleared and Tanis could see again, Felix had vanished.

  Tanis groaned in frustration and doubled over, pushing hands to his knees while he tried to catch his breath. As he stared at the empty corridor, reason came in with its soothing calm, and understanding dawned. The lad recalled his mother’s lesson on variant traits as if she’d spoken it but yesterday:

  ‘Nodefinders exist—equally rare—who have been known to travel upon twisted nodes that none should be able to follow.’

  There had to be a node or a leis in the corridor. Just as he was wondering how he might find it, another of his mother’s lessons came to him. He formed his intent as she’d taught him, and the node winked into view.

  Tanis approached it curiously. The portal seemed shadowed somehow, not the brightly shining reflection his mother had described, and he assumed this to be a product of the node’s twisted construction.

  Still, Felix had followed it, and in so doing, he’d shown Tanis the pattern he used. It had been seared in Tanis’s mind, as ind
elible as Loghain’s pattern had been, which Tanis had then instinctively used to slow the drogue wolf’s passage through time.

  It never occurred to Tanis to question his decision to follow Felix across the node, or to wonder at the danger involved. As he had wordlessly followed Pelas from the café in Rethynnea, trusting somehow to his path, so did Tanis channel elae into Felix’s pattern and take that fateful step.

  A moment of swirling disorientation followed. Painfully brilliant light twisted with variegated shadows, giving him the sensation of falling, but then he found himself standing upright—if a bit woozy. He blinked to focus his elae-blinded eyes in the dim light of his new surroundings.

  It must’ve been the greatest library he’d ever seen. Lamps burned low in sconces along the wall to his right. They gave off just enough light to chase the shadows from the corridors between the stacks, but not enough to illuminate the highest levels of the giant shelves. Above him, the vaulted ceiling was lost in shadows.

  “Bloody Sanctos on a stake!”

  Tanis turned in place to find Felix standing several paces away, gaping at him. “How in thirteen hells did you do that?” Felix’s expression twisted from startled to frightened to furious. “Even a ringed wielder shouldn’t have been able to follow me. The nodes are twisted, for Epiphany’s sake!”

  Tanis walked towards him. “You have to tell me about the name on that page, Felix.” He fixed a firm gaze on the other boy, his voice low. “It’s a very dangerous name to know.”

  “Whatever it is, how by Cephrael do you know it?” Felix started backing away in pace with Tanis’s approach, mismatched eyes hot with accusation. “Did the High Lord send you after me?”

  “By all that’s holy, Felix,” Tanis growled exasperatedly, “I’m not a spy for the High Lord!”

  Felix halted like he’d been slapped. He stared at Tanis in silence, and his expression lost some of its certainty. “You couldn’t say that so clearly if it wasn’t true.”

  Tanis let out his breath. “No.”

  “Then—” Felix flung a hand in the air before pushing it through his hair again, keeping it lodged there. “For love of the Lady, why did the High Lord sponsor you?”

  Tanis tried to keep hold of his patience. “The High Lord wanted a favor from my guardian.” He kept his voice low, but inwardly he was grinding his teeth, for they might’ve had this conversation weeks ago if Felix hadn’t been so intent on hiding his secrets. “My guardian in return elicited the High Lord’s sponsorship that I would find a place here.”

  “That’s all?” Felix sounded disappointed.

  “Yes, that’s bloody all.”

  Felix stared at him with his jaw shifted forward and his lower lip protruding slightly, as if he couldn’t quite think through this perplexing news without crunching up his face in the process. After a minute of this, he remarked, “Some guardian you must have to be the kind of man the High Lord calls on for a favor.”

  Tanis exhaled a sigh, finally feeling like Felix wasn’t going to bolt again any second…like they were finding common ground. “You could say that.”

  “But that doesn’t explain how in Belloth’s bloody name you followed me.”

  Tanis glanced back at the node. He couldn’t really answer that either. “I can just…do things sometimes.” He shrugged.

  Felix stared at him, waiting for more. “What…that’s it? You just do the bloody impossible, follow me across a twisted node—you, who aren’t even a Nodefinder—and just expect me to believe—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe. I don’t care what you believe. Believe anything you like.” Tanis stalked towards the other boy with a determined stride. “Just answer my question: how did you learn the name Pelasommáyurek?”

  Perhaps the gravity in Tanis’s voice finally got through to Felix, or perhaps it was the utterly uncompromising look in his colorless gaze, but Felix finally exhaled a dejected sigh, walked over to an armchair set against the paneled wall and slumped into it. He slung his knapsack on the floor between his feet, rummaged through it, and pulled out a folded page. This he handed to Tanis.

  It appeared to be a list of names written in another’s lean hand, not Felix’s careful print. Many of the names had a line crossed through them, including one Tanis read with a pang of unease: Isahl N’abranaacht. As Tanis scanned through the rest of the names, a strange feeling beset him…as if he knew them all somehow. In a moment he had it.

  “These are all maestros and literatos.”

  Felix nodded. A haunted look had come to his gaze. Now that Tanis saw it for what it was, he realized he’d noticed it since their first meeting. Something had been deeply troubling Felix for a long time.

  Felix handed him another page, also written in that lean hand. This was a list of letters written at random, side by side, similar to the other pages Tanis had seen Felix struggling with.

  “I found those two papers in a book Malin had.” It sounded like a confession, reluctant and apologetic and probably long overdue. Felix pushed a hand through his calico hair and fell back in his chair. “I think the long one is some kind of code. Malin loved codes—he was always making them up.” He looked away and grumbled bitterly, “It would be just like him to conceal some vital information in a code that only a genius could decipher.”

  Tanis took one of Felix’s crumpled pages and compared it against the one written by Malin, his colorless eyes scanning back and forth, automatically seeking patterns. “You’ve been trying to break it down and decipher it,” he murmured.

  “Yes—but Fortune curse me, I’ve gotten nowhere.” Felix pushed palms to his eyes with a painful grimace.

  Tanis squatted down to sit on the edge of the facing armchair. “Felix, what happened? Were you…were you with Malin when he disappeared?” He could think of no other explanation for Felix having these notes—the investigators would surely have confiscated them otherwise.

  “Yes,” Felix whispered, still covering his face.

  Tabling for a moment the mystery of how Felix had kept this information hidden, Tanis asked, “Did Malin tell you something? What happened to him?”

  Felix slammed his hands down on the arms of his chair. “I don’t know!” Tanis heard immense chagrin in this outburst, and beneath that, fueling the sense of desperation that bound Felix still, a deep fear that he’d failed his friend. Felix held a hand towards the distant dark with perplexity narrowing his gaze. “Malin was just there one minute and gone the next.”

  Tanis frowned. “Wasn’t he a Nodefinder?”

  “Yes, but not like me.” Felix looked Tanis over sharply, his gaze still hinting of suspicion. “Not like you. Besides, I checked all up and down the corridor. Even climbed the stacks on both sides. No nodes, no leis…there’s just no way he could’ve vanished, but…he did.”

  The hint of wary unease settled upon Tanis. “Did Malin tell you anything before he disappeared?”

  Felix rolled his head around on the back of the chair agitatedly. “He’d been acting strange for a fortnight—I don’t know, maybe longer. He finally told me to meet him here, said he’d found something no one would believe…that he didn’t believe it himself.”

  “What was it?”

  “Burn me if I know! Malin was acting like…like he expected something to come for him. You know, jumping at shadows. He said someone was hiding here or something…I don’t know. It sounded like he was in trouble. I thought…well, I thought maybe one of the names on that list was his kidnapper.”

  Tanis looked the names over again. His eye stuck on Maestro Lommeur, who had so furiously threatened Felix in their rooms that night. That’s when he understood. “You’ve been investigating them. All the names crossed off on this list?”

  Felix nodded glumly. “For all the good it’s done.”

  “That’s a lot of names. You’ve inspected them all yourself?”

  Felix worked the muscles of his jaw. “Not exactly.”

  Arching a brow at this ambiguity, Tanis went back
to the list and looked over the rest of the names, but other than Maestro Lommeur’s, only N’abranaacht’s held any significance for him. He glanced up at Felix. “You said you found this list somewhere?”

  Felix grimaced. He exhaled a ragged sigh and closed his eyes again. “Malin had this…book, you see. Oh, he shouldn’t have touched it—I told him that!—much less taken it from the vault. It was…” he slapped his palm to his forehead again and ground out, “By the Blessed Sanctos of my ancestors—he was so stupid!—it was one of the volumes of the Qhorith’quitara, the apocryphal books of the Sobra I’ternin—a book of power, you know?” He dropped his hand to his lap again and exhaled a forceful breath. “I found that list of names inside the book.”

  “Was that all you found?”

  Felix sighed dramatically. “…No.” He bent over and rummaged through his knapsack again and came out with three more pages like the one Tanis already held.

  Tanis looked each of them over intently, whereupon that uneasy feeling became a raging river of alarm. “This is bad,” he murmured, forcing a dry swallow. He looked up at Felix under his brows. “This is very bad.”

  Felix sat up and leaned towards him intently. “It’s a code of some kind, right?” Then he threw up his hands and fell back in the chair again. “Curse me if I can figure it out.”

  The first thing Tanis noticed about the four pages of apparently random letters was the actual name hidden among them near the top of each page. Felix wouldn’t have known these names—clearly he hadn’t realized they were names at all—but Malin obviously had. Probably he’d discovered them in the stolen book, but this didn’t explain….

  Tanis frowned. Something had caught his attention, but it took a moment to realize what he was missing. He scanned the page beginning with Pelasommáyurek spelled out near the top. Then he saw another name he recognized several lines down, mixed in with other letters at random: Kaye Lommeur, the maestro from earlier that night. Something about them both…what was it that his eyes saw but his brain couldn’t quite grasp…?