Abruptly Trell felt the shackles loosen. He opened his eyes to find the iron dissolving into sand and the world—around him, the world simply stood still.
Raindrops hung suspended, the brazier flames seemed sculpted from stone, and Taliah and the creature stood locked in their dark embrace.
“Can you walk, Trell?”
Trell struggled to believe this was really happening.
“…Trell?
He shifted his gaze abruptly back to Náiir, somewhat startled to see him still standing there. “I…don’t know.”
“I must release time to help you. Prepare yourself.”
Trell thought at this point he’d be prepared for just about anything.
The world shocked back into motion.
The flash of sunlight vanished. The demon flung Taliah into a corner and her chanting broke off with a scream. The creature spun to face Náiir, arms splayed, with fingers as claws and a rattle in its throat.
Náiir drew his sword, leapt atop Trell’s table and launched off it again. The demon hissed, and a streak of violet-silver shot towards Náiir. He caught it on his blade and slung it aside as he landed. It struck the tower wall and blasted a hole clear into the night.
The demon flung another violet-silver bolt, which Náiir cast aside with the same indifference. Then his sweeping blade came down on the creature and rent a crevasse from shoulder to chest. The demon fell back with a rattling snarl, scrambling onto all fours. Náiir advanced, spinning blade in the lead. The demon flung another ball of dark energy which Náiir again caught and cast into the walls. The demon hissed a raging snarl. Then it spun and dove out of the tower.
Náiir stared after it, frowning.
Taliah pushed to her feet with one hand supporting herself on the wall. “Whoever you are…you won’t claim him.” Her voice came as a gurgling rasp from pierced lungs. “Trell belongs to me.”
Náiir turned her a look over his shoulder as if considering whether to bother with killing her. Then he moved to help Trell. He reached an arm around Trell’s shoulders to help him sit up. “Can you stand?”
Trell slowly swung one leg and then the other over the edge of the table, but then he gripped Náiir’s shoulder, fighting vertigo. “I think…with help.”
“I think not,” Taliah hissed.
Paralyzing pain shot through Trell. His body spasmed, and he fell back onto the marble slab.
Náiir spun to her, eyes aflame. “Release him.”
She hung in the corner like a spider, arms splayed. “Trell is mine. We walk the path of mor’alir together!”
Trell wanted to tell her he walked nowhere with her, but he barely had breath enough to manage a guttural moan.
And in walked Vaile.
She took one look at Trell writhing on the table, and turned her gaze on Taliah. Then she was simply standing before Taliah with a hand around her throat and her body pinned up against the wall.
Taliah grabbed onto Vaile’s wrist with both hands while her toes scrabbled for purchase and she struggled for breath—but she kept her agonizing hold on Trell’s pattern.
“Release him,” Vaile growled.
Blood frothed on Taliah’s lips, and she wheezed a laugh. “I have your life pattern now.” Her voice strained around Vaile’s clenching fingers. “I can kill you…with a thought.”
“And I have your throat. Which of us can squeeze faster, do you imagine?”
Taliah’s eyes darkened, her gaze defiant. After a moment her face turned red, her eyes bulged, and muscles corded in her neck.
Vaile arched a deprecating brow. “Is that the best you can do, little witch?” She spun and flung Taliah contemptuously across the room. Taliah crashed into the wall and crumpled just shy of the hole the demon had vanished through.
The clenching pain vanished. Trell sucked in a gasping breath and curled his tortured body into an exhausted ball.
Vaile stalked towards where Taliah was struggling to rise. “I’m of the fifth, Taliah hal’Jaitar. You are mor’alir.” The word could not have held more contempt. Vaile stooped and pulled Taliah to her feet. She held Taliah once more by the throat while her other hand held her Merdanti blade low. “You have no more hope of harming me than a shadow has of harming a stone.”
Náiir helped Trell to sit up again. He braced himself and looked over at Taliah. She stood facing Vaile with tears streaming down her face. Their eyes met, hers beseeching, his unforgiving.
A gasp of desperate grief escaped her. She gave him one last look of longing, and he saw something in her gaze—
“Taliah—”
She grabbed the zanthyr’s blade with her bare hands, and thrust herself upon it.
Trell drew in his breath sharply. Vaile jerked back her sword, but the deed was done. Taliah fell to her knees and then onto her side. She looked up at Trell as blood pooled beneath her, and a whisper fled across her lips: “I…will see you soon…my love.”
Náiir turned Vaile a look of alarm. Then he moved to help Trell to his feet. Trell was beginning to feel like a china doll too many times broken and pieced back together. With an arm around Náiir’s shoulders and Vaile close behind, they reached the stairwell.
Trell drew up short. Fazil stood in the passage with his sword in hand.
“Our sentry,” Náiir explained with a smile. To Fazil, he added, “Let’s get to the roof.”
But before they could move, Vaile moved around and took Trell’s face between her hands. She searched his gaze with her own.
Emotion beyond words flooded Trell. Knowing she and Náiir had come for him, knowing also that Alyneri must’ve reached the sa’reyth, that she was safe…such relief and gratitude swelled in his heart that he almost couldn’t breathe.
Then Vaile kissed him.
The zanthyr’s kiss sent a cascade of electricity through Trell’s flesh, bringing a feeling of rebirth where Taliah’s kisses had only tasted of dying. While Trell felt rejuvenating energy flowing into him, invigorating him, so also he sensed Vaile was reading of him, of his life pattern, doubtless ensuring he was hale enough to make the climb…perhaps even testing the truth of Taliah’s haunting last words.
She released him with a second sweet grace of her lips. Then she turned to Náiir. “Now we go.”
And so they climbed.
Yet t’was not freedom but Death that awaited them on the tower roof.
Vaile emerged first, and deyjiin exploded around her.
She flung up a hand, but she was too late to catch and deflect the violet-silver energy, which rocked the air while sucking the life from it, stealing even the breath from Trell’s lungs as he arrived just behind her.
Without the protection of her blades still sheathed behind her back, Vaile had to bear the force of this wrath. It sent her sliding backwards on her feet and bore her down until she was bent with one hand and knee on the ground. Náiir sprang around her and caught the last of the blast on his blade. Then he launched after the demon who had fled from him before.
The demon’s sword flashed and Náiir countered with his own. They parried, and then Náiir twisted—Trell couldn’t entirely follow the maneuver, he moved so fast—and ripped the weapon from the creature’s hand. Náiir spun and slashed backhanded, right across the demon’s throat. For a moment the creature stood as if frozen. Then its head toppled one way and its body the opposite.
Náiir spun and ran to Vaile. He wore a ravaged expression as he helped her regain her feet. She braced herself with one hand against the wall, but with her other hand she waved him off. “Get Trell out of here, Náiir.”
“Vaile…” Concern rang all too clearly in his tone, in his gaze as he looked her over.
She looked up under her brows. “I’ll follow.”
Trell had managed the tower climb, but now he felt weak-kneed and short of breath. He reached a hand for the wall, missed and would’ve fallen, but Fazil caught him around his chest.
Náiir still looked troubled. “Vaile, I think—”
“I th
ink the Mage will never forgive either of us if you don’t get Trell back to him now, Náiir.” She gave him a hard look. “I will follow.”
Trell heard the shouting of men echoing from inside the tower, a mass of voices rising above the waning storm. They were coming fast.
Náiir still looked conflicted, but he turned away and took the form.
The air shifted into waves of heat and a sun burst into being. Then followed a great shimmering, as if every single particle in the air exploded with light. It was painfully bright to look upon, yet nothing could make Trell turn away.
The shimmering deepened, took on color that shifted rapidly from gold to bronze to copper, every molecule collecting a different hue. Then the sparkling expanded into form, into shape…into a powerful body and lengthy, spiked tail, into massive wings that hovered higher than the tower peak, and finally into the face of the dragon staring down at him from high above.
“And if I die now, I die fulfilled,” Fazil murmured the words of a Nadori proverb. Trell had never thought the saying more apt.
Climb up, Trell. Náiir’s voice resounded in his head.
Trell swallowed. He looked at the spiny back of the creature towering over him. He could see a place at Náiir’s haunches where he might safely sit, but reaching it in his current condition, which seemed to be deteriorating with every breath…? “Náiir, I don’t think I can.”
“What can you not do?” Fazil made his arm tighter in support of Trell’s weight.
Trell gave him a desperate look. “Climb.”
“You will do it upon my shoulders, Trell val Lorian.” And without waiting for Trell’s agreement, Fazil marched him to the dragon’s back and bent to one knee.
Trell stared wondrously at him. “Why?” He didn’t elaborate on the question, but he didn’t need to.
Fazil looked up and held his gaze. “You have showed me what honor is. I would serve you any day, and proudly.” He held out his hand and motioned Trell up. Stunned, Trell took it and climbed from Fazil’s knee to his shoulders, and, once the man had found his own powerful feet, to Náiir’s spiny back.
Gaining the dragon’s haunches, Trell looked down at Fazil and then over to Vaile once more in wordless gratitude.
In her emerald gaze as she locked eyes with him, Trell saw warmth and determination but also something else, something indecipherable…something that almost seemed like…accomplishment.
Then Náiir was surging into the sky with Trell gripping on tightly, and Trell knew only wind and charcoal clouds, and above these, the sun rising on a new day.
Fifty-Nine
“Real trust, true faith…these cannot be explained, only experienced.”
– Excerpted from the collected writings
of Epiphany’s Prophet
Isabel gritted her teeth and took several fast breaths.
She was learning to manage the pain. It would spread and build until it was so intense that she thought she must surely faint, but often in that very moment, Pelas would remove the needle tip to start a new thread of the pattern and give her time to catch her breath.
Still, the world spun dizzily.
She’d lost track of the days and the nights. Immortals didn’t need sleep. Her only sleep now came with unconsciousness, but that came more frequently than before. It had been at least four days since she’d eaten anything beyond snow or drunk other than melted ice. She didn’t know how long she could continue with nothing else to sustain her. Darshan apparently expected her to die beneath Pelas’s knife, but Pelas seemed in no hurry to rush her along.
That day he sat in a chair at her feet, carving a pattern into her thigh. One hand pinned her hip, holding up the linen shift he’d provided her, while his other hand drew the stylus through her skin with an artist’s steady precision. He attended his work with such careful concentration, a faint furrow between his dark brows and the light of creative passion in his gaze, if a shadowed one.
“What do you think about, Isabel?” He looked up at her under his brows. Even with the shadows haunting him he was a striking man. His face held a perfection of symmetry that all fifth-strand beings possessed, features formed of shadowed angles and sharp contours, his dark hair as liquid. “While I’m working on you, what do you think about?”
She summoned her breath. “How to help you.”
This made him smile. “Really?” He gave her a skeptical look that yet seemed pleased. “And have you made much progress?”
“Some.”
He looked at her strangely for a moment and then sat back in his chair. “Some. What some?”
She’d been trying for days to get through to him, to reach him, not merely the shadowed entity that possessed his thoughts. But so far nothing she’d said had penetrated the membrane of hopelessness that had enveloped the real Pelas.
“You must…” she wetted her lips, feeling the dullness of exhaustion and pain overtaking her, fighting to stay ahead of it. “You must know of the tapestry, of our paths.”
“Some.” He mimicked her with a shadowy smile. “What of it?”
“In Tal’Afaq, I got the sense that you…I perceived that you’d nearly chosen a path.”
He set down his stylus and considered her. “I was told by someone I trust that I have no path.”
She held his gaze. “Unless you choose one.”
He frowned ponderously at this. After a time, he rose from his chair and wandered to the window to stare out over the bleak mountains. “There was a boy who followed me once.” He turned her an unreadable look over his shoulder, his gaze intense. “A truthreader. I asked him why he knowingly followed me into danger, and he said he was simply following his path.” Abruptly he turned to her. “I have no concept of that feeling, Isabel. I don’t feel like I have any path. Nothing seems to stretch before me…” He leaned back against the wall. “No future and nothing behind.”
“Now, perhaps,” she conceded gently. “What about before?”
He growled in frustration and pushed off the wall. “Before, before—I hardly remember before.” He flung a hand into the air as he wandered about the room. “All I know is now, and now feels like eternity, and eternity feels like death.” Hit bit the word and cast her a glare bound by enmity, wrapped in fear. “In the void, ages passed in the blink of an eye. Without my power, a minute feels like a year, and a day a century.”
“If you would let me help you—”
“How?” He moved swiftly to her, grabbed her and pressed their bodies close. “How can you help me? Can you remove Darshan’s compulsion?”
Isabel’s breath came fast, nearly as fast as her heart. Desperately, she shook her head.
His face fell back beneath the shadow. Still he brushed a stray hair from her cheek with gentle concern. “Help me…” he barely breathed the words, a whisper of lost hope. After a moment, he shook his head and released her. Then he sat back down in his chair and retrieved his stylus. “There is no help for me.”
Isabel summoned back the breath he’d stolen. “Let’s say…let’s say Darshan truly took your immortal power away.”
He gave her a look that said clearly enough this wasn’t open to debate.
“Even so, he cannot change your basic nature.”
Pelas hung his head and stared at the stylus in his hands.
Isabel pressed on. “Your friend was right. You have no path—unless you choose one. But path or no path, by your very nature, Pelas, you summon to you whatever it is that you most need, whatever it is you desire…whatever you’re most focused upon.”
“Vortices.” He glanced up at her under his brows.
She nodded. “It makes you powerful…even without power.”
He sat back in his chair and considered her. Then he waved a little circle with his stylus. “By all of this, you insinuate that I drew you here to help me.”
She held his gaze. “Facts are facts.”
“Outcomes are all that matter.” He returned his attention to her thigh.
***
Isabel roused from a fitful sleep with a sudden jerk against her bonds, against shoulders that throbbed constantly and wrists that knew a numb ache deeper than the hunger in her core. Every part of her body knew pain; it had become a jealous lover keeping covetous watch over her form. She ached and she burned and sharp, stabbing needles dug into her flesh even in her sleep.
The latter came rarely enough, and when it did, it gave her no release, for that portentous dream of days past still haunted her. Over and over it played through her head, until she feared she must be missing something of vital importance. Else why would it plague her so?
Waking from it yet again, she looked for him—she always looked first for him. As horrible as her days were, it would’ve been more dreadful still to be chained in that tower alone.
Night lay over the mountains, but a luminous moon shone through the windows, limning the tower furniture in silver. She scanned the room—from fireplace to table, windows to bed. She couldn’t see him, but she sensed him near. Then she happened to look down and found him lying at her feet staring out the window, his eyes half-lidded but awake.
“May I have some water?”
He pushed up on one hand to look at her. “You talk in your sleep.” He got up and went to pour water for her.
Isabel watched him crossing the room, feeling a desperate loss at her inability to help him. Her voice trembled when she spoke. “I’m not sure that qualifies as sleep.”
He turned her a look over his shoulder. “What then?”
She shook her head. “Nothing I can explain.”
He came over and helped her drink, and as he had come often to do, he rested his head upon her shoulder while he helped her. Something in this gesture seemed so innocent and childlike. Despite everything, he captured her compassion in such moments.
When she’d drunk as much water as she could, she nodded to him, and he moved away.
“Pelas?”
He looked over his shoulder as he set the cup on the mantle.
“How did you betray him?”
Firelight illuminated his twisted expression. “I chose…I chose…” He sat down on the hearthstone and draped elbows over bent knees.
Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3) Page 91