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

by Melissa McPhail

  “Could you perhaps tell me one area where your shared beliefs diverge?”

  “The Prophetess and my Order embody different purposes, Miss Buonara. She professes to speak the Maker’s will; we simply follow it.” He gave her a humble smile at this, yet arrogance radiated through, searing away humility’s gauzy strands with its prideful heat.

  “Yes, I see.” She was growing more unsettled the longer she stayed in the room with him. It was a strange sensation to sit so close to the literato—what with his broad shoulders and deep voice out of the void, just his eyes catching a spark here and there, or occasionally the glint of an earring peeking from beneath his long hair, rose-gold in the muted firelight…startling to experience his gentle tone while something malevolent clearly hovered in the shadows of his darkly hypnotic eyes.

  How did he do it? How had he fooled everyone so completely?

  Nadia lowered her gaze and drew in a deep breath of the room’s cold air. “I read that the Palmers believe that all men have paths but that fifth-strand creatures do not. I haven’t found anything mentioning this in the works of Epiphany’s Prophet, Literato. Admittedly,” she added with a shy smile and downcast eyes, “I haven’t read all of the Prophetess’s prolific writings, but I wondered if you might speak to me a little of this idea. Why does your Order feel these creatures have no path?”

  Regarding her intently, he slowly set his teacup on the table before him. “You are well-versed in our collective teachings, Miss Buonara. Unusually so, for one so young.” The comment fell with a leading edge, expecting explanation.

  Nadia put down her tea untouched as well—she certainly wasn’t drinking anything before he did. “I’ve long been interested in the Greater and Lesser Paths, Literato. While other children played at dolls and swords…I read.” This, also, was quite true. She’d never been allowed to play with other children. Since she’d learned to read at the age of three, her days had been spent in study.

  N’abranaacht reached a hand across the table, and she quickly removed hers from her cup into her lap, but his long fingers only took up the pot of honey. “I’m not an expert on what my Order calls the isolated threads.” He dipped a tiny globule of honey into his tea and stirred slowly. “We believe that time is the great loom. The paths of men form the woof and warp of the tapestry of Life, the Great Pattern. The tapestry gains color through each man’s actions along his path, while its integrity is governed by a man’s intent. Ill deeds thin the tapestry. Honorable ones strengthen it.”

  She opened her mouth with a comment, but he preempted her with an upraised finger and a wry smile. “I am getting to your question, Miss Buonara.” Still slowly stirring his tea, N’abranaacht continued, “This explanation outlines the paths of mortal men, but the fifth-strand races are immortal. How, then, does one explain them?”

  Nadia wetted her lips. “I’m afraid I’m missing some understanding, Literato.” She was struggling to form a coherent sentence beneath the force of his interest, which was aimed upon her now like the unrelenting midday sun. “Why does their immortal nature change their path through the tapestry? Would they not merely weave a longer thread?”

  “The paths we walk anchor us to the time continuum, Miss Buonara.” His dark eyes gleamed as he regarded her with a frightening intensity. “One lifetime, one thread. The Prophetess, I believe, writes that a single being might walk the tapestry many times, but always upon the same thread.”

  His gaze fixed so strongly upon her set Nadia’s heart to racing with disquiet. She fought the urge to squirm beneath the force of his attention. “I…fear I don’t understand, Literato,” she whispered, her voice losing both breath and volume to his consuming gaze.

  “I think you understand quite keenly, Miss Buonara,” he murmured in a deeply quiet voice. His eyes traveled, looking her over, smearing heat across her skin.

  Nadia felt her face flushing, while a cold fear uncoiled inside her belly. “So, you’re saying that because they’re immortal, they…what?” She wished he would stop staring at her. She couldn’t concentrate beneath his gaze anymore.

  “An immortal creature cannot weave one path, one lifetime.” His dark eyes held her in thrall, luminously hypnotic in the room’s flickering firelight. “The tapestry is comprised of threads spanning single lifetimes. It is therefore apparent that an immortal creature has no path.”

  “Do…do you believe then that…that their…” —by the Lady, it was so hard to think!— “that they still influence the tapestry?”

  His lips parted in a slow smile, stirring fear. “Indelibly.”

  Nadia didn’t think she could stand even one more minute beneath his gaze, less yet the vulturous emanations of his thoughts. She moved unsteadily to her feet. “Thank you for speaking with me, Literato. I…fear I should be going.”

  His dark gaze licked over her. “There is no rush, Miss Buonara. I believe my other appointment will not be coming after all, and you haven’t taken any of your tea.”

  Her gaze darted to the cup and its amber liquid. “I apologize, Literato. I feel…” she pressed a hand to her throat. “I suddenly feel a slight malaise.”

  “A great shame,” he murmured, but whatever thought lay behind these benign words sent the currents undulating out in waves that washed painfully through her consciousness. “Perhaps another time. I would be pleased to continue our conversation in greater depth.”

  Nadia did not trust herself to speak. She managed a fleeting smile and a curtsy and rushed from the room.

  ***

  When Nadia was gone, Shailabanáchtran crossed one knee over the other and frowned. His gaze strayed towards the drawing room door, while a tightening around his eyes betrayed his malcontent. He wondered what game Pelas’s little toy, Tanis, was upon. It nagged at him that the lad might have some inkling of his plans, or that the girl Phoebe might be part of a conspiracy to thwart them.

  For a moment, Shail pondered what trouble Tanis could potentially cause. He couldn’t see much opportunity on the boy’s horizon, though with the High Lord di L'Arlesé as a sponsor, he had powerful allies in the mortal realm. Yet the only thing that truly concerned him was what Tanis might be reporting to Pelas.

  He’d seen nothing of his older brother since the night he’d let Demetrio Consuevé have a chance at killing him, but he didn’t for a moment believe the man had succeeded—if Shail knew anything of Pelas, he knew his penchant for escaping impossible odds.

  It troubled him somewhat that Darshan, too, had been curiously silent for the past fortnight. If Pelas had gone to him in complaint of Shail’s manipulations…could the two of them have reconciled?

  Shail immediately scoffed at this idea. Neither of his brothers would ever approach a median line; Pelas was too stubborn and Darshan too arrogant.

  Shail shifted his gaze to his servant. Have the girl followed. See who she speaks to, and when the time comes—

  Suddenly his skin prickled and he flowed to his feet. His silk robes seemed to dissolve and reform, and in this amorphous shifting they darkened from white to crimson, like blood soaking a cloth. “Someone has entered my chambers.”

  Shall I—

  “Do as I’ve commanded you.”

  The servant bowed. Yes, my lord.

  Shail summoned a portal and shaped Shadow to his will. As he stepped into the void, his gaze narrowed decisively.

  Pelas could not be allowed to interfere.

  Fifty-Four

  “A wise man learns from his failures. A brilliant man learns how not to fail.”

  – Ramuhárikhamáth, Lord of the Heavens

  Tanis stepped off the leis into N’abranaacht’s chambers feeling shaken and unnerved. He supposed that sliding haphazardly down the side of a dome three hundred feet above the earth would disturb any rationally-minded person—as compared to, say, Nodefinders.

  He turned a glare on Felix and hissed, “When you said you could get us in here, you failed to mention it would involve sliding down the side of the Physical Scien
ces dome!”

  Felix tossed his calico hair from his eyes and grinned. “We’ve really got to work on your sense of adventure, Tanis.”

  Tanis turned away and shook his head. “You and Pelas would get along well.”

  Felix swiveled a look down a hallway leading out of the sitting room where the leis had deposited them and scrubbed at his arms. “Why in the name of my Sacred Aunt Bruna’s goat is it so bloody cold in here?”

  Tanis was wondering that, too.

  N’abranaacht’s apartments were located in a residential scholars’ hall and as such should’ve shared a similar temperature. Instead, being in the room felt like standing in the endless void of space.

  “I wonder what the other scholars make of this,” Felix muttered, still briskly rubbing his arms. “‘Come for tea, we serve winter year-round.’”

  “I doubt he brings others here.” Tanis looked around the apartment, which was richly appointed for all it might’ve been located inside an iceberg. “I can’t see him deigning to entertain others. He would think it beneath him.”

  Felix turned him a curious look. “One conversation and you’re suddenly an expert on N’abranaacht?”

  “No.” Tanis frowned as his eyes came to rest on an ornate lacquered cabinet that reminded him of a similar one in Pelas’s seaside Hallovian mansion. “I just know how they think.”

  “Well…” Felix screwed up his face. “Let’s see what we can find. You go that way,” and he waved nebulously toward the dim hallway.

  Hugging his arms against the chill, Tanis headed down the passage. The place looked benign, yet an ill premonition seemed to mount with every step. By the time Tanis was halfway down the corridor, he felt washed in foreboding—deluged by it—his truthreader’s senses accosted by a dark symphony of malignant wrongdoing that screamed through the corridor so loudly he marveled Felix didn’t notice.

  Tanis hunched his shoulders against the sensation and continued past a library to reach the end of the hall and the last two doors. One led to a bedroom, the other into a study.

  This can’t be right. He’d seen nothing untoward, nothing unusual, nothing to explain the intense chill—which reminded him all too nearly of Pelas’ and Phaedor’s nightcloaks formed of deyjiin…

  Even as the thought occurred to him, Tanis wondered if it was indeed deyjiin he could be sensing. His fair brow narrowed as he considered the idea.

  Ignoring then the nagging voice in the back of his mind that roused too many questions about his own nature, Tanis envisioned the pattern his father had described in his journal to reveal the currents—indeed, had he not just practiced its construction in Chresten’s dining room yesterday? As mortifying as that experience was. He filled the pattern with elae—with his intention, as his mother had taught him to do—and released it.

  The currents illuminated the hall as if a painter had suddenly washed the passage in glowing paint.

  Tanis stood for a moment in open-mouthed wonder watching the tides of elae swirling around him: rose-hued funnels of the first mingled with sparkling silver dust that was the omnipresent fourth, while the floor turned a burnished bronze overlaid with a translucent, knee-high river of rushing gold…

  To think that such marvelous power filled the empty spaces of the realm…these spinning whirlwinds of kaleidoscopic light. All the airy world was actually a deep sea of variegated rose, silver and gold. He felt a sudden heady excitement…

  At least until he turned and noticed the golden, earthbound currents flowing through the wall at the end of the passage. The other currents too, in their way, seemed to be drawn there, as if a cyclone spun beyond the barrier, gravitating all forces in its direction.

  Feeling that sense of foreboding burst to life anew, Tanis approached the wall and tentatively extended his hands to the plaster.

  They passed right through—and the air on the other side of the illusion felt like ice against his flesh.

  Tanis snatched his hands back with a sharp inhale. A host of thoughts accosted him—warning, scolding, encouraging caution and cowardice in the same instant—but ultimately, he had to find out what lay behind the illusion. Tanis drew in courage with his breath and stepped through the wall.

  The icy air accosted his lungs and stabbed icicles into his unprotected skin. Tanis pushed his hands beneath his armpits and exhaled clouds with every breath as he walked between the long tables of a laboratory. Ancient looking books and scrolls littered the workbenches. Where any of them lay open, Tanis saw inverteré patterns that hurt his eyes.

  But what really roused the hairs on his arms was the glowing, silver-violet patterns hovering in midair, twilit globes of deyjiin like snowflakes, every one unique—and all of them inverteré. They provided the room’s only light while radiating their chill power. Tanis thought he walked carefully between them, but some of the patterns began to tremble slightly, soundlessly. The motion caused jagged ripples in the currents.

  Indeed, elae swirled tumultuously around these patterns and moved on without touching them. Their aspect—that is, the negative force of the inverted patterns—repelled elae’s currents on an existential level.

  Tanis noticed that the earthbound currents were sweeping towards the back of the room, so he headed that way.

  That’s when he sensed another’s presence.

  Her thoughts floated to him suddenly: curious, frightened…and oddly ashamed. And beneath these, the echo of a being in anguish and pain. Her fear mingled with his own, rousing a sense of impending danger that sent the ghost of a shudder down the lad’s spine.

  Forcing a dry swallow, Tanis headed toward a grouping of couches and chairs arranged around a massive fireplace, its hearth dark. Just to the right of the mantle, he saw it—a black void in the wall.

  Oh gods…

  Tanis sucked in his breath and went still, staring at the glossy portal that could only be an entrance to Shadow.

  That’s why the air was so cold!

  Suddenly he felt far more afraid than he’d been only moments ago. To think that Shail had erected a permanent portal—a permanent hole in Alorin’s fabric—knowing that it would suck elae into the void of its existence…draining the very life slowly from the world…

  Tanis shuddered and hugged his arms to his chest.

  Phaedor had explained that deyjiin tore the fabric of the realm to gain the dimension of Shadow, which acted like filler between the realms while itself remaining formless. But he’d also explained that such rends in Alorin’s fabric must be quickly sealed and tightly controlled, lest the rending spread and disrupt the entire tapestry of existence.

  Seeing this…this utter contempt for the realm’s integrity…Tanis realized just how deep the well of Shail’s loathing really bored.

  Instinct shouted to get out of there as fast as possible, yet duty rooted Tanis. He stood for a span of heartbeats staring at the space in the wall, wondering at its purpose…worrying over it. Then the agonized thoughts filling the room became too loud in his mind, and he turned to seek their source.

  As he moved further into the dark room, he saw her hidden in the corner between the wall and a long, glass-fronted cabinet: a gigantic bird sitting atop an ornate silver perch.

  Bathed in the violet-silver light of the floating patterns, the hawk looked a bleached etching of herself. She was massive though—sitting easily three feet tall—and her wingspan must’ve been…

  But Tanis noticed then that her wings had been clipped, her claws ripped out, and her ankles tethered to the perch with a particular silver rope that made his skin crawl in recognition. He’d rather have not remembered his own experience with goracrosta.

  The hawk shut her golden eyes and tucked her head away into the shoulder of her wing. In that moment, Tanis clearly heard her anguished thought, Why must he stare?

  He caught his breath.

  Then he caught his hand on the back of the nearest chair, for understanding rocked him. This was no mere bird. This was an avieth. And so vehemently abused—trea
ted like a mindless animal, yet suffering a very human indignity.

  Tanis felt sick. “I…wish I could help you.”

  Her head flashed around, and a tawny eye pinned him.

  If you would help me, kill me.

  The despair in the thought wounded him deeply. Tanis even considered it for the space of an indrawn breath, but his compassion had already claimed the lives of two Adepts—and both times nearly his own as well. He still occasionally woke in the night awash in sweat stained with those Healers’ memories, reeking of their broken hopes. He didn’t think his soul could bear the weight of a third Adept life, even to give release to one so egregiously defiled.

  “I’m sorry, I…cannot.” He dropped his eyes in shame. “I dare not.”

  The avieth flapped her wings and cawed a shrill protest, but her thoughts, cast even more loudly, put explanation to her reaction.

  She hadn’t realized he could hear her.

  The eye pinned upon him again as she resettled, a fierce gaze. Who are you? What are you doing here?

  Tanis looked around the laboratory at the glowing patterns, at the gateway to Shadow. “A grave fool.”

  You’re not one of his…not meant to become?

  Tanis frowned. “I…” He didn’t understand her comment. “I know him for who he is, and I want to stop him, but…” he looked desperately around the room again. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Run. T’was an anguished plea.

  Yes, run is exactly what he wanted to do. Strangely, his legs had their own ideas. Tanis met the avieth’s watchful gaze. “He’s planning something, isn’t he? Help me stop him.”

  He heard her mental scoff. What could you do? You are a boy.

  “One with powerful friends.”

  She seemed to consider this. Then he felt her reticent thoughts pushing his mind away. He will punish me for eternity.

  Tanis looked her in the eye. “What eternity will any of us have if he succeeds in his purpose?”