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

by Melissa McPhail

  “Perhaps more forces should be sent there.”

  Viernan’s eyes narrowed. This creature was definitely trying to manipulate him. Well…he would play along. Perhaps it would slay Trell and rid Viernan of the problem altogether.

  “Yes…” he drew out the word as though considering the possibilities. “Perhaps reinforcements should be sent. Perhaps you both should go with them.”

  Tagn exchanged another look with his silent twin. “We would not want to leave you unprotected.”

  Oh, how cunning it thought itself. Couldn’t it see he could read it like a page in a child’s picture book?

  “When Cephrael’s eye crosses these lands, Tagn, creature of Shadow, His gaze moves quickly on.” He hoped it remained true. Fate’s attention had never lingered long on Tal’Shira. More reasons to keep Trell val Lorian far away.

  The Consul eyed Tagn speculatively. “If your master wishes to help us, let him lend his strongest resources to protect our most important prisoner.”

  Tagn bowed his agreement. “I submit to this wisdom.”

  Of course you do.

  Tagn turned to go.

  “Out of curiosity…” hal’Jaitar’s words halted the eidola, who looked over its shoulder. “How do you think you’d fare against a Sundragon?”

  Tagn’s black lips spread in a slow smile, and a violet-silver sheen crackled across the razor nubs of its stone teeth. Then both creatures blessedly departed.

  Fifty-One

  “Grab luck by the balls when you can. Fortune has a fickle heart and a short memory.”

  –The pirate Carian vran Lea

  A man’s screams woke Trell in the night. He lay in bed listening, then not listening, trying not to listen, and finally hearing nothing else. When he could stand it no more, he threw off the sheet and stalked to his door, but the latch felt stiff beneath his fingers. So…Taliah had locked him in. She wanted him to hear the stranger’s suffering.

  Very well.

  Trell went to the windows and threw them open. Then he sat on the sill, laid his head back against the wood casing and closed his eyes.

  He was still sitting there when his door opened shortly after dawn. The screaming had stopped perhaps ten minutes prior, so he knew it had to be Taliah come to see how well he’d endured the dark music of her night’s performance. She came inside and closed the door behind her.

  “Enjoying the fresh air, Prince of Dannym?”

  He spared her a sideways glance, noting her approach. “Not as much as I would enjoy it elsewhere.”

  She came and stood beside him and ran her fingers along his bare chest. “Submit to me, and I’ll bring you ecstasy like you’ve never known.” Her hand slipped to his groin and her mouth to his ear. “Everything I know of pain, I know equally of pleasure. Both lie on the path of mor’alir.”

  His eyes went to her hand clutching him and flicked dismissively away. “All your talk of mor’alir stinks to me like specious justification.”

  She took a step back and stared at him in evident frustration. Then she turned and caught her thumb between her teeth. “I admit…I expected to have gained your submission by now. This far into your brother’s captivity, I had broken him.”

  Trell’s heart went still, making his ears ring with silence. “What did you say?”

  “Your brother Sebastian.” She cast a little frown over her shoulder. “Before my father sent him to the salt mines of N’ghorra, he gave him to me to question. Like you, he’d proven remarkably resilient to conventional torture. Perhaps it’s something in your val Lorian blood.” She plucked at her teeth with her thumbnail. “I would need another of your brothers—or your father—to test the theory. Alas, your father vanished while in transit to the parley with the Emir. Dead, we fear.”

  Trell clenched his jaw and let out a slow exhale. Today she wielded words as weapons. “What do you want, Taliah?”

  She spun to him, eyes hot. “You know what I want, Trell val Lorian. Your submission!”

  “I told you in the beginning I would give you nothing freely.”

  “But that was before we began down the path of mor’alir together.” She sounded almost petulant.

  He grunted and shook his head and refused to look at her.

  “I’ve given you many freedoms—too many, I think now.” Taliah’s tone boiled with malcontent. “Perhaps you would prefer I locked you in Darroyhan’s dungeons, into darkness?”

  “If memory serves, your father tried that already.”

  In the stormy silence that followed, he could nearly hear the convoluted cogs of her mind grinding and twisting. Then she spun and stormed from the room, slamming the door in her wake. Not much later, the nameless man started screaming again.

  The day passed in this fashion.

  The sun baked the stones and heated the air, and the man screamed. Trell drank all of the water in his pitcher, and the man screamed. The sea went from mercuric to azure to a gilded, ashen orange, and the man screamed. The worst part for Trell in all of the day was in recognizing how closely the man’s screams mirrored his own, as if Taliah’s techniques followed a sequence, enticing a dark melody that made cadence of a man’s screams and built them into percussive crescendos.

  Trell sat in the window and listened to the pitiful man and wondered if Taliah had really tortured his own body for so many unending hours.

  After a certain point, the time and the pain had blended together. But hearing this man’s hoarse screams all the night and day, and knowing she’d likely worked him personally the same way…it brought a renewed horror to those otherwise disjointed memories.

  A lesser man might’ve heard the stranger’s agonized howls and feared for himself, for his future…but Taliah’s cruelty only hardened Trell’s resolve. It proved to him that she didn’t understand the most important elements of him, and that she’d spent too much time learning and practicing her black music to the screams of lesser men.

  The sun fell and Cephrael’s Hand rose in the west. Trell watched the Nadoriin manning Darroyhan’s towers and walking its battlements and wondered why there seemed to be twice as many as before. His gaze followed one line of guards to the nearest tower, where two men stood in black silhouette. For some reason, their presence made the night seem darker.

  Trell left the window and laid down on his bed. He clasped hands behind his head and watched Cephrael’s constellation travel its slow, logic-defying arc. He was wondering how many of the stories about it were true when his door flew open and crashed into the wall.

  The mute crossed the room, grabbed Trell out of his repose and dragged him off. He stumbled along willingly enough beside the giant man, who held his arm higher than was needed or comfortable, but when he saw where they were heading, his feet turned leaden.

  The mute hauled him into the chamber and shoved him forward hard enough that he landed on hands and knees at Taliah’s feet.

  The room’s high windows had been opened to admit the sea breeze, but it still stank of sweat and excrement and the peculiar tang of fear. Trell got slowly to his feet, brushed himself off and cast a wary gaze at the man lying naked, chained to the marble table. Just seeing the man made his own shoulders ache. He’d spent many tormented days in the same position, with those chains holding his joints just shy of popping out of socket. He pitied the man until he recognized him.

  Then he knew only a churning anger.

  Taliah went to stand behind the man’s head and stroked his damp hair. He whimpered.

  “Do you remember him, Trell?” She turned inquiringly. “Did I not tell you that you’d brought death upon two men with your carelessness? Hafiz seeks death now, I promise you.” She kissed the sailor softly on his forehead. “Don’t you, Hafiz?”

  He whimpered again.

  Taliah lifted her gaze to Trell. “There is a dagger,” and a flick of her eyes indicated a slender knife lying at the table’s edge. “Take it up. End his suffering.”

  Trell eyed the blade. He could end all of their suf
fering if he merely used the dagger on Taliah, but the mute stood beside her ready to protect her with his life.

  Taliah stroked the sailor’s head again, and he let out a low moan.

  Trell frowned. Where was the trick in this?

  “It was you who doomed Hafiz with your carelessness. Can you not find compassion for him? Have you not heard his screams?”

  Trell looked from Taliah back to the sailor and frowned. He had to be missing something. This woman wouldn’t know compassion if it stood nose to nose with her, shouting its own name.

  Taliah stroked the sailor’s forehead with her thumbs. “Such suffering. Will you not show him mercy? Wouldn’t you want someone to do the same for you?”

  And there it was.

  He had wished for death many times when Taliah had been at him for countless hours—days…weeks. But he’d never wanted it truly. Not in the depths of his soul. Only in protest of enduring an agony beyond measuring.

  A man might truly kill for mercy under certain circumstances, but if Trell took Hafiz’s life now, he would be denying the sailor the right to make that choice himself.

  Perhaps Hafiz sought death, as Taliah claimed, but Trell had been upon that same table, and even after all he’d endured, if a man had come at him with a dagger, he would’ve fought against him with every ounce of his will.

  He took a step away from the table. “No.”

  Taliah’s eyes flashed. “Damn you, Trell!” She threw out her hand in rage, and pain struck him everywhere at once.

  He collapsed to the floor and curled reflexively into a ball, but the pain only intensified, so his body forced his legs compulsively away. He curled and extended then in rapid jerks, pulsing to the frenzied waves of her anger.

  While Trell writhed in soundless agony, Taliah pushed her hand over Hafiz’s forehead and concentrated. Then she ripped her hand away.

  Hafiz roared. His back arched with the crescendo of his howl, legs and arms pulling against the chains until his joints distended, until his flesh became purple beneath the strain. Then he fell back against the table, dead.

  “Put Trell on it,” Taliah hissed.

  Blinded with pain, Trell hardly noticed when the mute picked him up. Nor could he find the focus to struggle as the man forced him spread-eagle and chained his wrists and ankles. But he knew it when Taliah mounted him.

  Laying hands against his bare chest, she spun her power to send heat into his groin and pump his heart and loins. Then she sheathed his erection inside herself. This always heralded the worst of her torments, for through this bond of body and mind she could bring him pain in impossible, inconceivable ways.

  Which she proceeded to do with meticulous deliberation.

  The sea of pain that crashed over Trell should have brought unconsciousness, but Taliah trapped his awareness so that oblivion couldn’t claim him, so that he lay pinned against the floor of her will while waves of agony pummeled him.

  How long this continued, he didn’t know. Time excused itself to other diversions while Taliah assuaged her frustration via torment and misery. But when at last he surfaced from beneath that pounding, torturous surf, he found her face hovering close and her breath hot upon his parched lips.

  “What do you live for, Trell?” She planted a kiss on his mouth, forced his teeth apart, and sent her tongue probing within. Her lips were cold, her mouth wet. It felt like Death kissing him.

  She ran a finger along his cheek, and fire traced the line of it. “What do you live for?” Her thighs tightened, and her insides clenched around his shaft. Lightning speared through his veins. “What could you possibly have to live for?”

  As the whips of Taliah’s aggravation lashed him, welts appeared on his skin.

  He sought oblivion, but she grabbed his chin and commanded him back. “Too quickly you seek to succumb to my pain.” Her teeth were clenched as tightly as the muscles between her legs. “But not today. Today I will have an answer.”

  Where her fingers held his jaw, his gums began to bleed. He tasted the metallic tang…welcomed it. Anything to mask the taste of her.

  “Tell me!” She shook his head back and forth, making even his ears ache. “Why do you fight me so? What’s the source of this contrary and dogged indomitability?”

  Trell could barely find breath. The surface seemed so far and the water so murky. He managed, half expecting bubbles to appear before his burning eyes, “…honor.”

  “Honor.” She made the word sound a curse and drew back from him. “Always it’s honor with you.” She grabbed his jaw again in a painful grip. “You lie to me. How can such buoy you on the tides of my pain?”

  Perhaps because she wanted an answer, the tide of pain ebbed enough that thought returned. He maneuvered his chin free of her and spat the blood from his mouth. “Taliah…” He focused his gaze coldly upon her. “I cannot explain honor to someone who has none.”

  “Honor is a word,” she hissed.

  “Yet I’m whole because of it.” He held her gaze with his own like hardened steel. “You’re a fractured blade. You have no hope of splitting me.”

  Taliah gasped.

  The fury that flooded into her expression couldn’t be described, only experienced. And oh, how she made Trell experience it—long and arduously. She shattered a bone in his arm with a single thought, and another in his leg while he still screamed from the first. But her wrath knew no bounds that night, nor was there any boundary to the torment she wreaked upon him. Parts of him bled and others split, and she didn’t stop until she was certain no man could look upon his body and call him whole.

  ***

  When Trell at last escaped into unconsciousness, Taliah let out a scream of rage that quickly devolved into tortured, gasping sobs. “Get out!” she screamed at the mute, but then she turned wet eyes back to Trell and cared not what the giant saw or thought.

  As the mute shut the door behind his exit, she pounded her fists against Trell’s chest and fell across him. She ripped her dress from her shoulders, pressed her small breasts against his form and clung to his neck and wept.

  He was right.

  He would never break beneath her. He would never look upon her with loyalty and adoration forged through pain. He would never seek her approval, desire her desperately, or give himself to pleasure her.

  Taliah cried because she could no longer avoid the truth. She hadn’t broken Trell; he had broken her. He’d won. She loved him desperately, and he despised her with every fiber of his being.

  Wait…

  Taliah sat up and wiped her eyes, smearing Trell’s blood across her face.

  There was a way.

  It lay not upon the path of mor’alir—even mor’alir Adepts viewed compulsory bindings with disdain. But this wouldn’t be a bond of compulsion. Rather…well, it was a bond, and unwillingly administered. The Sorceresy might curse her for it—he would certainly curse her for it—but as Trell found that he couldn’t live without her, so he might come to accept her…in time. And in the end…perhaps he would even come to love her.

  It was kinder than compulsion. The Sorceresy would forgive her once they understood, even if Trell never would. But his forgiveness didn’t matter when he would be hers forever. Much could change during the slowly turning wheel of eternity.

  Taliah placed her fingers on Trell’s mouth and parted his lips gently. Then she held his face and kissed him. Her tongue captured his while her body clenched his shaft deep inside, and she sought his life-pattern along the strands of the first.

  Even after she had attacked it so angrily, still it glowed. She’d never seen a man with such vibrant life shining within. He seemed a god to her, so like perfection. It only followed that loving such a man would leave scalding wounds that never healed.

  To his pattern she attached a first-strand thread of bonding—a simple thing and easily cut if one knew to look for it, but no one would look for it. She attached the other end of this thread to her own life-pattern, something all mor’alir Adepts were taught
to find.

  There.

  It was done.

  Yet…somehow even knowing Trell’s life was now affixed to hers didn’t allay the ache in her heart. Another sob escaped her, and Taliah climbed off his unconscious form. She laid a hand on his broken thigh and thought about healing him. But then she decided a few days of suffering were in order—at least as long as she suffered for loving him. Yes, at least that long.

  Fifty-Two

  “There is no limit to what he can know.”

  – Náeb’nabdurin’náiir, Chaser of the Dawn,

  on Björn van Gelderan

  A wave of relief washed over the Alorin Seat Alshiba Torinin as she entered her apartments in Illume Belliel. It had been a difficult day. Her steward, Harryl, and two servants carrying armfuls of books followed inside behind her. Harryl led them into her study to show them where to set down their burdens. She didn’t envy him the task of finding an open space.

  Since Raine had spoken to her of Malorin’athgul many moons ago, Alshiba had used every minute when the Council of Realms was out of session to learn about those dark creatures. The cityworld’s Archives—meticulously catalogued and maintained—were supposed to hold copies of every important work from the thousand realms, but even in this vast library, she’d found few mentions of Malorin’athgul beyond legend and myth, even among the works of so many varied worlds.

  When Alshiba had first come to Illume Belliel long ago, she’d been surprised to discover so many races with incredibly disparate histories and beliefs. The diversity of belief had especially frightened her, for in her young naivety, she’d thought that everyone knew the angiel Cephrael and Epiphany and that all must surely follow the Sobra I’ternin, even as Alorin did.

  Yet as the years had spun on and Alshiba had grown in understanding and experience, she’d come to see that no matter how varied, nearly all beliefs shared some common threads, as if somehow…somehow the same gods truly had made all of the realms, leaving a trace of the story of their divinity passed on in stone, parchment or oral tradition.