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

by Melissa McPhail

  Think! What would Arion have done? How would he have solved it?

  Out of the fog of exhaustion the Twentieth Esoteric blazed: ‘The strands are divisions of energy…thus the laws of patterning follow the laws of energy.’

  Mulling this over, Ean fixed his gaze on the slowly approaching eidola. Patterns were energy. Thought was energy. He needed a way to destroy the patterns of thought-energy that bound the eidola to Darshan’s mind…to life.

  Eidola were immune to direct attacks of the fifth, but the world around them wasn’t. And while stone didn’t conduct energy well …water did.

  Standing still within the continually expanding shards of time, Ean formed a plan—dangerous, insane. It would either work or be the end of him, but how was that different than any other day?

  He drew in a deep breath and made his decision.

  Ean reached for the storm and simultaneously released the third. Time slammed back again—all of those infinities of seconds collapsed into a single moment, but they brought into that moment the entire force of their expansion. The implosion jarred Ean so hard that he stumbled and nearly fell.

  But he had hold of the storm. Embracing it to the fullness of his awareness, he pulled it upon himself and ripped the storm into the gallery.

  Rain emptied into the room in a whirling deluge. Ean waved his sword, his talisman for this working, to collect the storm in a swarm around the approaching eidola. A whirlpool enveloped them. He ran towards the group, and as he did, he bound each molecule together so that it wasn’t a whirlwind of water but a standing, swirling whirlpool. He collapsed the boundaries of this vortex to encase them tightly, until the eidola were spinning, twisting, tangling together, washed off their feet in a torrent of violently churning water. Then he dove into the pool.

  Stone hands found him. Stone elbows and knees and toothless black gums bit into him. Ean let them pull his body within the tangle of their limbs. Water bound them all now into an airless cocoon. Eidola didn’t need air, but Ean did. He had as long as he could hold his breath to make this work.

  The eidola pulled and clawed at him while he sought the pattern of their existence. An elbow caught him in the temple, and painful stars knocked the pattern from his thoughts. But it also reminded him of something important.

  ‘Patterns lay within the boundaries of Absolute Being.’

  Keen to avoid the mistake he had made when sparring with Ramu—when he’d turned the entire Hall of Heroes to ice—Ean applied the Second Esoteric and expanded his being to include all of the eidola and his whirling pool of water.

  His lungs burned. His head felt like it was ready to explode. His thoughts grew dim at the edges, and the creatures clung to him like chains dragging him deeper into the vortex of his own creation.

  Ean finally got a handhold on one of them and found the pattern in its mind. He had one chance to do this right, one chance to sear not one pattern of binding but all of them from existence. He took it.

  A flat sheet of energy flared outwards from the whirlpool and sheered across the room, incinerating everything in its path. Men dove to safety beneath it or were seared in two. A strip of fire raced along the wall with the expanding sheet of death.

  The vortex fell apart.

  Ean plummeted to the floor amid a painful tangle of inert stone bodies while his whirlpool splashed down around him. He choked and sputtered and tried to claw his way out from beneath the creatures crushing him. His head felt like it had exploded.

  He finally rose unsteadily to his feet. He had a high-pitched ringing in his ears, and dullness veiled his eyes and thoughts. He stumbled forward, trying to regain his bearings, trying not to think about how for a split-second moment he’d been the source-point of elemental lightning.

  Only then did his muddled mind realize that alarm bells were ringing, that Brody and two other eidola were attacking his brother, and that—

  Something hard crashed across the back of his skull.

  Light flared with blinding pain, and Ean flew forward onto the ice, lost his breath, lost control…and as his sliding body sped towards the shattered windows, lost consciousness.

  Forty-Nine

  “The illusion called ‘hope’ is the most egregious deception ever waged upon Man.”

  – The Prophet Bethamin

  Sebastian’s head felt like an anvil was crushing it as he lay pinned beneath Raliax. He knew he needed to focus, to do something, but a wall of incongruous thought separated idea from action. Raliax meanwhile clung to him. His eyes fumed with a fulminating concoction of resentment, envy and malice while his thumbs choked off all chance at breath.

  “Puppet…” The defamation frothed across the Saldarian’s lips, unbridled rage preventing all but choked-off words of hate. “Madman’s toy.”

  Sebastian felt blackness threatening. Warm blood soaked the back of his head and took concentration with it as it seeped into the ice. The world spun dizzily, dragging his stomach along on a twirling dance. Then—

  A blur.

  Raliax flew sideways, and a shadowed form stepped across Sebastian’s body in pursuit. Sebastian rolled to his side and pushed slowly to hands and knees. With his breath returned some semblance of lucid thought. He turned to see Rhys standing over a kneeling Raliax with a sword pushed against the hollow of the Saldarian’s throat. Sebastian retrieved his own sword and staggered to the captain’s side. Rhys looked as unsteady as Sebastian felt.

  Raliax lifted his hands in resentful surrender and his lip in a sneer. “What a touching reunion.” He spat blood and glared acidly up at them.

  “What do you want done with this filth, Your Highness?” Illness made Rhys’ voice faint, but nothing dampened the determination in his tone, and his sword pinned at the man’s throat remained amazingly steady.

  The captain’s formal address startled Sebastian, but he kept his expression neutral and his gaze focused on the Saldarian. Eight years ago, this man had befriended and betrayed him, given him to his enemies to be tortured, and then sold him to slavers. Vengeance was his due; yet as he stared at Raliax of Tambarré, all Sebastian truly felt for him was pity.

  “Who is the puppet?” Sebastian pushed the sharp edge of his Merdanti blade beneath the Saldarian’s chin and forced his head back. “The one bound to the strings of another man’s will, or the one who jerks at his master’s whims without any strings at all?”

  Raliax’s gaze burned with hate. He opened his mouth to retort, and Sebastian ran him through.

  As the Saldarian slid off his blade, Rhys lowered his sword with a tremulous exhale. He looked ready to fall over. Then he crumpled.

  Sebastian caught him around the waist and helped him to sit. Their eyes locked. Sebastian recalled too well their last interaction, when Rhys had been his prisoner. Sebastian had left that meeting feeling shattered. He’d never imagined the captain had recognized him.

  “You know me.” Sebastian searched the captain’s eyes with his own.

  Rhys held his gaze with deep lines creasing his brow. “Aye. I knew you even then. Would that I’d had the courage to admit it in that moment—” His eyes went round. “Your Highness!”

  Sebastian spun to his feet just as three eidola descended upon him. To his horror, he recognized the tallest among them as having been one of Trell’s men…the one they’d called Brody the Bull.

  He brought up his sword to meet Brody’s flashing weapon, and his sentient blade sang true in the clash, yet Sebastian felt the jarring force of their meeting blades reverberating all the way into his bones.

  How in Cephrael’s name does Ean fight these monsters?

  Sebastian couldn’t believe their strength. He tried to force Brody back to find the steps of the cortata, but he could barely counter the creature’s power, much less maneuver it into the Adept dance of swords.

  Suddenly one of the other eidola grabbed him around the waist. He struggled to keep Brody’s blade locked with his, struggled to keep his feet beneath him.

  And then—


  He couldn’t describe—couldn’t comprehend…

  The eidola that had been Brody was bearing down on him one moment, and in the next it and the third creature staggered back. The ratcheting hisses of the eidola trembled the air and then they…

  Sebastian stared, open-mouthed. The creatures made it three paces before they dissolved—their last two steps sent them crumbling, deforming into black sand. Brody’s sword clattered to the stones.

  In his astonishment, Sebastian lost his footing and fell beneath the last eidola. His tortured head screamed as he landed on his back, and—

  A flash of darkness blurred before his eyes. The eidola flew off him, backwards through the air, sprawling and hissing and spitting what could only have been curses, until—

  It slammed into the floor and exploded into ash.

  ***

  Veiled in illusion, Isabel van Gelderan stood in the hall outside the gallery where Ean and Sebastian fought. In her mind’s eye, all three of their paths shifted around her tumultuously like a ship in hurricane seas. Sebastian and Ean’s paths shimmered before her vision, their threads expanding and contracting, blurring and then solidifying anew, each time assuming a different shape. And of her own path, she saw a wavering gold thread extending into a wall of formless darkness. She felt unbalanced.

  Windows shattered in the other room, and the castle inhaled a damp wind. Isabel sensed Ean fighting, felt his determination across the bond. She ached to help him, but she dared not take a single step in any direction for fear of over-tipping the dangerously lurching vessel that was his path.

  Isabel gripped her staff in white knuckles and laid her forehead against its cool stone, willing herself to endure.

  When she’d faced the knowledge that she would spend long centuries separated from Arion, she’d yet known they would meet again. Fortitude had kept her company. But since her recent dream, she could see nothing of her own path beyond the dark wall. She knew it must continue on, but what she would find beyond that blackness…what she would face there? She had only vague visions to give shape to the future.

  She’d never felt so afraid.

  Suddenly instinct jarred her roughly from the far future paths she’d been traveling and thrust her indelicately back to the present.

  A wall of darkness was coming towards her from the far end of the long corridor, but this darkness had shape and form. Eidola.

  And behind them…

  Oh, no!

  Naked eyes would not have seen him, for he was still too far away, but the lifeforce itself fueled Isabel’s sight, and the painfully bright star following behind the eidola could be only one man.

  It’s too soon! She pressed a hand across her mouth. They cannot meet yet!

  But Darshan was coming for Ean. She knew it in the fabric of her being, in the very threads that bound her consciousness to the tapestry.

  Darshan was coming for Ean. He’d seen Ean each time the prince severed Darshan’s connection with one of his eidola, and he’d gained in those encounters a sense of Ean’s mind. Now Darshan was following the star of Ean’s awareness right to his location.

  He’s not ready!

  Isabel felt ill with dread. If Ean and Darshan met now…

  We’ll lose him from the tapestry forever!

  For weeks she’d feared her presence was affecting Ean’s path. Now she knew the truth to be much more painful: she wasn’t influencing Ean’s path, she was causing their two paths to merge into one path.

  Her path.

  Somehow she had to give Ean time to separate their paths again, to let him find his own way back to Darshan—a safer way, a longer way…the way he should’ve been upon. A route that would give Ean the opportunity to grow into his power, so when he and Darshan met in another future, in what seemed to her to be an inevitable contest of wills, Ean would have at least some small chance of surviving the encounter.

  Suddenly the tumultuous sea around Isabel went still.

  She saw all three paths converging.

  On came the wall of eidola and the cold, fiery star that was their maker, while in the other room Ean was unmaking Darshan’s evils one by one.

  Along her path, frightening formless images shifted and became clearer, though no less frightening.

  Isabel drew in a deep breath and let out a tremulous exhale. Then she closed her eyes and reassembled her resolve out of the shards of her fears.

  She could forgive Ean anything—three hundred years of mistakes and separations, of failures and sacrifices and catastrophes for the sake of the noblest intentions—but she feared…she truly feared Ean would never be able to forgive her for this.

  Isabel picked up her staff, exhaled determination, and accepted her path.

  She slipped unnoticed into the gallery, gliding as a shadow into chaos. Even as she watched, three eidola descended on Sebastian. Further down, Ean was rising to his feet amid a sea of drowned eidola.

  Behind her in the hall, the currents trembled. Darshan approached.

  Isabel extended her staff, focused both her aim and her intent, and sent a piercing arrow of the fourth flying. It struck Ean across the back of his head and sent him skidding across the ice. Even as she set off towards Sebastian, Isabel flung a pattern of the fifth to halt Ean’s momentum before he careened out the window, unconscious.

  Let Darshan try to find him now.

  Before her, Sebastian faltered. An eidola slipped beneath his guard while he was fighting one of its brethren and grabbed him around the waist. He struggled to keep his footing.

  Running to his aid, Isabel spun her staff over her head and summoned a pattern she never imagined she would ever have to use—but sometimes only fire could fight fire.

  Sa’shah’serrr…

  The pattern hissed in her mind as she cast it forth—once, and again. Two bolts of violet-blackness caught first one eidola and then the second. They staggered backwards with rattling screams and collapsed into sand.

  Isabel swept in and caught the third eidola in the back of its head with her staff as it was attempting to pin a fallen Sebastian beneath it. The creature flew backwards through the air, sprawling and hissing. Lightning quick, Isabel spun her staff again and cast a third inverteré pattern off its tip.

  It hit the eidola in midair, and the creature landed in an explosion of ash.

  Isabel rushed to Sebastian and helped him to his feet.

  “Isabel—” His eyes were wide, his face bloodied. He looked stunned, shaken.

  “Get Ean out of here, Sebastian—out of this castle. Out of Saldaria. Use Ivarnen’s node. Ean should rouse by the time you reach it.”

  Looking aghast, Sebastian inhaled with obvious protest, but she stopped his argument with an upraised hand. “We have less than a minute, so listen well. Tell Ean he has to find a way to unmake entire companies of these creatures in one blow. Tell Dareios I said to use inverteré patterns if he must.”

  Sebastian stared at her.

  Motion from behind drew Isabel’s gaze, and she turned to find the captain struggling to his feet. She went and took him by the elbow and did what she could to ease his illness in their brief contact, but she could spare only seconds for healing, and his sickness had rooted deep.

  Even so, the captain must’ve felt her Healing, for he somewhat gaped at her. Then again, he might’ve been gawking at the blindfolded woman who’d just turned three eidola into ash.

  “Come, both of you.”

  Isabel hastened towards an unconscious Ean. She knelt at his side and smoothed back his dark hair. Seeing him lying there, knowing she was leaving him…the moment stabbed her heart with a thousand knives. She could barely breathe.

  Isabel looked up desperately at Sebastian. “Tell him Darshan was coming for him, and I…” Her voice caught in her throat. “I saw no other way.”

  “Isabel,” Sebastian murmured wretchedly.

  “Take him.” She swallowed her grief and stood. A wall of eidola approached in the hall. “Hurry.”

&nbs
p; Radiating uncertainty, Sebastian bent and gathered his brother into his arms.

  Isabel held a hand to him and Rhys to stay where they were and rushed across the room. When she gauged herself far enough away, she turned to face them, spun her staff end over end, and slammed it into the floor. A thunderous, echoing clap preceded the jagged crack that speared as lightning through the floor. Tile and plaster disintegrated, and a chasm opened before her feet. She shaped the working to her desire as it spread, and a slab of the floor fell inward on an angle, sloping down to the level beneath.

  In the corridor beyond, the currents raged. Darshan neared.

  “The node.” She pinned her gaze on Sebastian, demanding his full attention. “You know where it is?”

  He nodded.

  “Go, then.” She pointed with her staff to the sloping floor.

  He went, reluctantly carrying his brother. When he and the captain once again had their feet, Isabel threw them her staff.

  Rhys lifted both hands and caught it, but he stumbled beneath its weight. Sebastian threw up a hand to catch the staff’s descending end as the captain fell, and she saw him instinctively put elae into his touch.

  As ever, your instinct guides you well, Sebastian.

  Isabel called down to them, “The weapon knows both of you now. If anything stands in your path—magical or otherwise—use it.”

  Sebastian’s eyes gazing up at her revealed his immense conflict.

  “I’m on my path, Sebastian. Do not let him come for me. Remember all else I’ve told you.”

  A moment longer he stared at her, and then she felt the tension which bound him flattening with resolve. It was less a surrender than a concession to her understanding of things beyond his ken.

  Sebastian bowed his head. “Your will, Isabel.” Then he turned with his brother in his arms and led the captain away into the darkness.

  ***

  “Who in the name of every god of this earth was that?”

  Sebastian spared a look over his shoulder for Rhys. The captain was doing his best to keep up with Sebastian by using Isabel’s staff for support. In his debilitated condition, Sebastian found it surprising Rhys kept apace at all. Without Isabel’s staff, it would’ve been impossible. Still, Sebastian got the sense, even as Rhys likely did, that Isabel had given them her staff less to assist their escape than as a sacred charge.