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

by Melissa McPhail

  Violet-silver lightning streaked through the web. Tanis flinched away—and just in time, for the entire dome exploded in a charge of deadly static.

  Thunder without sound rocked Tanis off his feet. He saw a pattern flash in his mind’s eye, and then he was skidding across the polished marble floor. So disorienting was the moment that he barely registered the warmth of elae’s sudden rushing return.

  Lying on his back, momentarily stunned, Tanis first found his breath and then his vision. He rolled over and pushed up to his hands and knees, but the room spun dizzily. He felt unbalanced, like the floor beneath him—and even all the world—was teetering precariously upon a fulcrum that could easily tip along any of a compass-point of directions. It felt distinctly dangerous.

  Then Pelas was at his side and had a hand beneath his arm and was helping him to stand. Tanis blinked and looked around. The eidola were scattered, the Warlock vanished. He watched a familiar silver line split down through the air.

  No! Not yet! He gripped Pelas’s arm with sudden desperation. “We can’t leave without Nadia!”

  Pelas searched his gaze. Then he arched a brow as if with recollection. “Ah, yes…the princess.” He turned a look over his shoulder towards Nadia. The silver line splitting the air vanished.

  It occurred to Tanis that Pelas knew quite a bit more about Shail’s activities than he’d anticipated.

  Pelas read the question in his gaze. “We have much to discuss, you and I, but not here.”

  Abruptly, the air shifted.

  Pelas hissed and spun his head even as Tanis saw a dozen silver lines splitting down through air. A heartbeat later, the portals opened and eidola came pouring out.

  “By Chaos born, Shail.” Pelas ground out the words as if they were a powder beneath the pestle of his ire.

  Tanis watched the lines of eidola streaming out of Shadow and felt that unbalanced sense growing ever more vertiginous.

  Pelas’s gaze tightened. “These eidola are bound to the Warlock. That’s why he fled me just now, to launch the next phase of my brother’s ill-conceived plan.” He clenched his jaw. “Shail doesn’t know when to quit driving a wedge between us.”

  A wedge between you both, the lad thought, and a hundred eidola between us and Nadia.

  “Tanis…” Pelas turned him an intense look, searching the lad’s gaze. “The use of Shadow is too dangerous now. If we seek your princess through this onslaught, you must be prepared for the possible consequences.”

  Tanis nodded grimly. He looked back to the creatures, who were spreading out like an army before them and blocking their path to Nadia. They moved oddly to his eyes, coordinated and yet…not.

  And then…

  Suddenly all of those crazy ideas that had been running in circles in Tanis’s head speared outwards before him with inspired clarity, so that he could see how each would play out in a single instant.

  He felt the unsteady floor tilting in a certain pliable direction.

  “I have an idea.” Tanis grabbed Pelas’s wrist. Then he grabbed time and made a ribbon of it to wind through the masses of eidola. He darted forward along that thread, dragging Pelas after him.

  “Tanis, what—” Pelas resisted him at first, but as the world around them shifted, he must’ve quickly understood, for he gave the lad an incredulous look, locked his hand around Tanis’s wrist to bind their motion together, and kept pace at his side.

  The eidola blurred as Tanis wove time—wove them out of time, carving the extended moments from the dark nothingness between seconds, between heartbeats and breaths. He and Pelas were a blur of light on the currents as they sped through the lines of eidola as mutably as the wind, slipping around and between the creatures even as Tanis slipped around the pylon seconds of time.

  Elae sang in Tanis’s veins, but so also did a sense of strength and power and purpose. Tanis didn’t use patterns to carve time to his will; he merely knew what he wanted to cause and caused it—

  Until a force like a flying stone wall slammed into him.

  Tanis lost hold of time—lost his breath, even lost his vision—and flew sideways through the air. He felt something grab hold of him and spin him, and then he sort of hung suspended for a second before being released indelicately into a pile on the floor. With the strained return of his breath, the world blinked back into focus.

  A dozen feet from where he’d landed, Pelas and Shail circled each other, both holding Merdanti blades. Tanis understood then that Pelas had somehow protected him from the brunt of Shail’s attack. He marveled anyone could react so quickly.

  He watched the two Malorin’athgul circling for a heartbeat more, whereupon he realized that Pelas was strategically keeping his body between Shail and Tanis, protecting him—

  No—stalling Shail.

  Tanis scrambled to his feet and sprinted for Nadia.

  ***

  Pelas watched time being transformed as he ran beside Tanis, wrists interlocked. Yet more truly he ran arm in arm with amazement. Did the lad know he was working the third strand innately?

  Seeing Tanis again after so long, after personally enduring and gaining so much, only to find that the lad had also come into his own…the knowledge filled Pelas with feelings of pride and wonder.

  This appreciation in itself amazed him. He’d never been attached to any of Alorin’s children, but Tanis had bound him in ways he wasn’t certain he would ever fully understand. It pleased him to wonder if he’d ever had a chance of escaping Tanis’s determination to save him.

  And he wondered now, upon leaving Isabel only to find Tanis with Shail, if the lad was somehow influencing his brother’s path as well.

  Suddenly Pelas felt the fabric shifting—a new and different tug upon the omnipresent fifth strand. He was coming to understand that all of the strands connected into the fifth—even the first strand, though more ephemerally—and that one needed only to monitor the fifth to sense shifts in elae’s broader firmament.

  Nearly in the same instant, a wall of force sideswiped Tanis and wrenched his wrist from Pelas’s grasp. Pelas threw a bubble of the fifth around the boy to protect him from what could only have been his brother’s working and spun out of Tanis’s time-thread while the lad was still flying through the air.

  Planting his feet, Pelas swept his arm over his head and drew his blade from the hilt at his back just as the sea of eidola parted to let Shail through.

  His brother flowed in crimson silk, carrying his black-bladed weapon low. Shail boasted that he’d commissioned his blade from a master craftsman and used patterns of his fashioning to make it sentient. But Pelas had forged his own Merdanti weapon beneath a zanthyr’s judicial eye, pounding patterns of sentience into each fold of steel.

  The one thing he appreciated about Shail was how his brother constantly underestimated him.

  “Pelas,” Shail remarked as he neared.

  “Shail.”

  “I warned you not to interfere in my affairs.”

  Pelas cast his gaze about the hall. “You invited me here, brother.”

  Shail’s dark eyes flashed. “To claim your spy.”

  Pelas fingered the hilt of the blade in his hand. He remained aware of the lad, just rousing now behind him. “Tanis is no spy of mine. I thought he was yours in the beginning.”

  Shail’s razor gaze held his, unconvinced. “If not your spy, whose?”

  The ghost of a smile hinted on Pelas’s lips as he thought of everything that had become of him since his first meeting with Tanis. “Perhaps Alorin’s?” He shrugged.

  His brother’s expression hardened, and he looked Pelas over again with contempt notching his upper lip. “Darshan told me he had you contained.”

  Pelas motioned with his blade to the army of eidola funneling into the room. “This is a lavish reception for someone you didn’t expect to come at all.”

  Shail’s gaze tightened. “When speaking of you, Darshan has been known to exaggerate.”

  Pelas cracked a smile and moved to keep
his body between his brother’s gaze and Tanis. “I give you credit for doubting him. Would that you doubted him more.”

  “Darshan said you would betray us. In this he wasn’t incorrect.”

  Pelas arched a brow. “Betrayal is a curious word. It assumes some agreement to begin with.”

  Fury simmered behind Shail’s gaze. His ire churned the currents into whitewater. “Darshan has been far too lenient with you, Pelas. You won’t find me such a patient nursemaid.”

  Disbelieving laughter burst out of Pelas before he could think to stop it. “The way you two go on about me—as if I were a wayward steed needing guidance and castigation equally—”

  Shail growled a muted curse and advanced on him, raising his blade. “I know your weaknesses, Pelas.”

  Pelas moved sideways, forcing his brother to turn, keeping Shail’s gaze averted from where Tanis now ran to free his princess. “Do you think me so unaware of your deficiencies, brother?” He flashed a sharp smile, his gaze alight with flames of goading. “My only endgame is stopping yours. Which of us faces the greater challenge, do you imagine?”

  Shail’s expression went as black as the obsidian hall. He growled another curse, swung his blade high and rushed Pelas in a billow of blood-red silk.

  Pelas charged his blade with power and moved to meet his brother. Enchanted steel clashed in a flare of power that expanded in a ring of searing, violet-silver light. Even eidola fell beneath it.

  The two Malorin’athgul scraped their blades free and immediately swung for each other again; again their weapons clashed with a thunder of intent that cast the currents into turmoil. Shail used his formidable stature to his advantage, but Pelas had grace and skill beyond his brother’s brute strength. The tiger met the leopard on the plain and found an even match.

  Pelas pushed Shail to keep his brother’s enmity focused upon himself. Power pulsed with every blow of their flashing blades, sending shockwaves rippling across the hall. Eidola scattered or were crushed beneath the violent field of deyjiin that surrounded the fighting pair.

  Shail threw patterns with every swing of his blade, but Pelas remained alert to them, thankful for Isabel’s warnings—thankful to her in so many ways. He spun and swung his sword and kept himself shielded with his power. Until—

  Shail’s gaze strayed for the flick of an instant, but Pelas jolted.

  Understanding roused every hair on his body in alarm, for he suddenly witnessed in himself the same failing he’d criticized in his brother. Yes, Shail had underestimated him…but he’d also underestimated Shail.

  Pelas tried to turn, and found Shail’s sword blocking his path and his cold smile blocking his gaze. In the distance, the eidola started forming up ranks, which could only mean that their master had arrived to command them.

  Tanis!

  Pelas thought he’d been keeping Shail occupied. It seemed all the while his brother had been doing the same thing to him.

  Shail chuckled. “You make it so easy, Pelas.” He sidestepped again to block Pelas’s advance, and again their swords clashed in a shuddering crash of power. Pelas flung his brother off him and spun away, but Shail moved swiftly to block any retreat.

  They stalked each other like predators amid the dark field of demons. Spinning his blade, Shail speared Pelas with his gaze and salted the wound with the contempt in his smile. “Do I think of you as an intractable gelding? Nay, brother—you’re but a child manipulated with a bit of candy, or a glint of sunlight captured upon a mirror’s edge.”

  He launched forward and with three heavy blows drove Pelas violently back, away from Tanis and the direction of his intent. Pelas worked the muscles of his jaw and parried his brother’s attacks, trying to envision another outcome, a new plan. Fate bent a knee to their will—his will simply had to be stronger than his brother’s.

  Then he had an idea.

  He ducked Shail’s swinging blade, spun out of his reach, and slammed his palm into the chest of the nearest eidola. Power flared and focused as he channeled deyjiin in a massive pulse into the creature.

  It flew backwards, limbs splayed, mowing a path through two dozen others; with every new creature touched, the pattern channeled newly, magnetically, so that silver-violet light careened like lightning through the assemblage, spreading in wildfire fashion the malady of Pelas’s intent.

  Shail exhaled a furious hiss and dove at his brother.

  ***

  Tanis willed the eidola not to see him as he ran with his gaze set on Nadia. He pushed this intent as a wave before him, a shield of sorts, and the creatures all seemed to look away just as he was about to streak by them. Whether a product of his will, or luck, or the lack of their master to direct them, Tanis didn’t know, but the eidola let him pass unmolested.

  He watched them as he ran among them and finally realized what it was about their manner that seemed so unnatural. They moved together instead of individually—unlike a man with his own mind and thoughts, these eidola resembled a flock of birds, quite different in manner from the golem creature he’d confronted at the amphitheater. From this observation Tanis concluded that all eidola were not created equally. These had no individuality, no singularity of thought.

  Is this what Sinárr would have Nadia and I become?

  No, not eidola—the grim and quite unwelcome thought imposed upon his consciousness. It was as if he could still hear the Warlock whispering in his ear, ‘Concubine…’

  Tanis shuddered reflexively just as he reached the stairs leading up to the baldaquin. He took them two at a time.

  Nadia roused as she saw him. Her tearing eyes widening, she tried to cry out around the silver rope gagging her mouth, but no sound emerged. Only her gaze shouted in warning.

  Tanis skidded to a halt just as several eidola stepped out from behind the pillar to bar his path. The closest grabbed for him.

  Tanis made a blade of time and let the eidola pull him into its embrace. Then he shoved his time-blade backwards into its chest. He had the forethought to snatch the eidola’s weapon from its hand as his working thrust the demon several minutes into the future. It vanished.

  Tanis spun into the cortata just as the next creature came at him. He parried its downward stroke, turned beneath their locked blades to free his own, and then sliced a deep arc across the eidola’s chest. He threw a bubble of time at it as it fell back and jumped to meet the next one while the sundered one vanished.

  The third eidola ducked Tanis’s swinging blade, stepped into his guard and elbowed him in the chest. Tanis flew backwards beneath the baldaquin’s stone canopy and lost his hold on the lifeforce. He somersaulted onto his feet again as the zanthyr had trained him, but his mind felt duller, stunned by the powerful blow, and his breath had deserted him.

  The creature came at him, spinning its sword. This one clearly had known swordplay before becoming bound to a monster—which monster was the salient question. Tanis didn’t for a heartbeat believe Shail’s claim that Sinárr controlled all of these creatures. Their variable individuality indicated they had different masters.

  The creature came at him, sweeping its blade in powerful downward strokes. Tanis dodged left, then right, but he had no choice but to parry its third swing. Without the cortata’s power, the jarring blow reverberated through his bones all the way into his heels.

  Tanis stumbled back and nearly fell. The eidola cast aside its sword and barreled into him, taking him down against the hard marble. The creature’s hands found his throat while its stone body pinned the lad to the ground. Within seconds Tanis started seeing spots. He breathed in elae and called the currents into view, seeking any desperate way of getting free—

  A shearing line of violet-silver light speared through the air. It caught the eidola across the back of its head and ripped the creature off him.

  Tanis gasped a painful inhale and rolled to reclaim his sword. He scrambled on hands and knees then towards Nadia, keeping his head low to avoid the concussive waves of power that continued charging through
the room. Blessedly, the baldaquin’s twisting column protected Nadia from the brunt of this force. Even so, her eyes were wide and she was shaking when Tanis finally reached her.

  He stood in the protection of the column and hastily cut the silver rope. Nadia fell forward into his arms and clutched him desperately. He took greater care with the gag of goracrosta around her mouth. Then she was inhaling a shuddering breath even as he’d done.

  Oh, Tanis!

  Tanis felt a tightness in his own throat as he held her close. How terribly he’d missed the reassuring presence of her mind connected to his own! Even more than her physical being, that constant mental connection had grounded him—emboldened him—in ways he couldn’t entirely explain.

  In the next moment, two things occurred: Tanis again felt that odd shifting, like the floor tilting beneath him. Then a sudden presence cast the currents into pelting turmoil.

  Tanis instinctively threw up a shield of the fourth around himself and Nadia and thrust her behind him. He turned towards the source of the disturbance, but he knew already what he would find.

  Sinárr was walking up the steps in a froth of smoke and shadow. A phalanx of eidola trailed at his heels, much resembling the flock of birds Tanis had envisioned. The lad put his blade between the Warlock and himself, pressed Nadia behind him, and backed away.

  “Oh, Tanis…” Sinárr’s voice, for all it sounded a whisper, carried across the distance, drowning out the eidola’s rattling, the clash of the immortals still fighting, and even deyjiin’s concussive waves. His golden eyes pinned wondrously on the lad. “I’m so thrilled and amazed by the things you can do. When you and I are bound, you shall entertain me with your many talents.”

  Nadia caught her breath behind him. He pressed her farther back and took another step in retreat. He doubted his sword would be of any use against Sinárr, and he doubted his shield of the fourth would protect them from the man’s power for long—if at all. Somehow his father’s journals had failed to explain the correct way to battle a Warlock from the Shadow Realms.