Part of him felt guilty and morose and worried what his lady must be thinking, how afraid for him she must be and how all of his companions must feel he’d betrayed them by sneaking off, but the practical part insisted that the others would understand.
That’s good, because I certainly don’t.
Mostly Tanis felt uncertain and sad and really regretted his decision while at the same time knowing he would make the same decision again if it presented itself.
These were complicated and inexplicable feelings, much too complex for an innocent boy of fourteen to make sense of right away.
As it turned out, he had all day to think on them.
He’d been back and forth from the window a dozen times when the sun finally slunk to hover between the overcast and the darkening sea. He was kneeling glumly at the window again, timing the growling of his stomach against the crash of the waves at high tide, when the door to his room banged open. Tanis let out a startled yelp and spun to find a Fhorg standing in the portal.
“Pelas wants ye lad.”
Feeling suddenly apprehensive, Tanis got to his feet and shut the window. Then he followed the Fhorg from the room. Three flights down a grand, curving staircase landed them in a large hall bordered on one side by huge glass doors overlooking a stone patio and the sea. As Tanis passed an open door leading to an inner hall, he glimpsed red candles burning around two Fhorgs, who sat cross-legged with their backs against each other and their palms bleeding onto the floor. Tanis caught whispers of their thoughts and shuddered.
His Fhorg guide escorted Tanis out onto the patio, wherein the lad saw Pelas standing at the far end, facing out to sea, with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a jacquard ochre coat with belled sleeves, and his long hair blew wildly on the wind of the rising storm. He looked altogether unearthly and frightening, a creature of lightning and thunder, born of the storm.
Terribly nervous now but trying not to be, Tanis watched the Fhorg return inside and sort of stood there uncertainly, wondering what to do.
Eventually Pelas turned and pinned his coppery eyes on the boy. “Come here, little spy.”
Tanis swallowed and went to him, coming to an uneasy halt at his side.
“Who sent you to spy on me?” Pelas asked without looking at him. “Tell me all, this time. I mislike lies of omission, Truthreader, and believe me,” he added, pinning Tanis with a telling look, “I’ll know when you’re holding back.”
Tanis swallowed as he looked up at him. The man seemed less menacing than he had the day before, and his thoughts were calmer. Tanis could barely hear them. “The truth is…” he began, unsure of how to put into words the incomprehensible sense of duty that had compelled him to follow Pelas, “well…the truth is I don’t know why I followed you, sir. I mean—” Suddenly it all came tumbling out. “I saw your thoughts back in the café, and then I—I just had this feeling—I can’t explain it—and…and I had to follow you. I don’t know why. I really wish I hadn’t!” he added pitifully.
Pelas turned him a shadowy smile. “I’m sure you do.” He looked back to the rising storm just as lightning flared, splitting down through the sky between clouds and sea. The wind blew his long hair into crazy, twisting designs, and gazing at him, Tanis wondered if he might not be of their world at all. “Do you like storms, little spy?” Pelas asked as thunder sounded, a vast gong of the heavens.
Tanis turned back to the choppy sea and hugged his arms to his chest. Between the wind and the chill Pelas emitted, he was getting really cold. “We don’t have storms like this very often where I live,” he answered. “Not with lightning and thunder like this. The winds though…they can be terrifying fierce.”
“I like the storms here,” Pelas mused. “Aspects of them remind me of home.”
“Where is that, sir?” Tanis asked through chattering teeth.
Pelas pinned him with one coppery eye. “Far from here.” Then he frowned at the boy. “Are you cold, little spy?”
Tanis nodded. In fact, he was shivering.
Pelas spun on his heel and walked for the door. When Tanis didn’t immediately follow, he called without turning, “Coming?”
Tanis ran to catch up.
Pelas breezed inside the hall and led away down a corridor, and Tanis followed feeling confused. Where was the Pelas who’d viciously tormented the Healer Camilla just the night before? The Pelas whose thoughts were so twisted and dark and who’d tried to kill him with his power?
This couldn’t be the same man.
Pelas led him to a circular room overlooking the sea. The waves crashed against the chalky cliffs below them, such that they seemed to be breaking against the foundations of the manor itself. A table abutting the windows had been set with a meal, and Pelas took a chair there, motioning to Tanis to join him. “The Fhorgs never eat, you know,” he said as they sat, then added as an afterthought, “that is, not with me.”
Tanis slowly sank down onto the other chair. He kept waiting for the man to strike him for no reason, for his thoughts to suddenly turn volatile, for something unexpected to happen. This anticipation made him jumpy and upset his stomach. It did not, however, prevent him from eating when Pelas offered to share his meal.
They sat in the dark together then, eating in silence. It wasn’t until Pelas had finished and pushed his plate away that he sat back in his chair and regarded Tanis significantly. “So, little spy,” he said, calling Tanis’s gaze to his. “How is it you are quite healed since our altercation of last eve?”
Here it comes, Tanis thought. “I don’t know, sir,” he said with a wince, anticipating a blow.
But Pelas merely frowned at him. “Have you been this way all of your life?”
Tanis opened his eyes and relaxed his shoulders, glad that Pelas hadn’t hit him but more baffled than ever. “Um…I think I must’ve been.” Tanis had been putting quite a bit of thought to the idea all afternoon. “I mean…I’ve never really been hurt badly before, so I can’t say—not like…”
“Like yesterday,” Pelas supplied quietly.
“Yes, sir.” Tanis had never thought much on the subject before—he’d never had a reason to—but he’d realized during the afternoon that he couldn’t remember ever really even being sick. Maybe he’d had a cold once…
“It would seem you are as confused as I am about yourself,” Pelas remarked, noting the boy’s perplexed frown.
Tanis looked to him uncertainly. “I guess so.”
Abruptly Pelas grabbed his hand and held his wrist tightly. He pinned his eyes upon the boy, and Tanis felt that cold chill descend upon him again. He immediately started shivering. “W-what is sup-posed to h-happen?” he managed through chattering teeth, feeling unsettled and intensely discomfited by this mercurial man. You ought to be happy he’s not a raving lunatic tonight, Tanis! he told himself, but instead, he wondered if maybe that’s exactly what Pelas was.
Pelas released him and barked a laugh, sitting back in his chair again. “It’s incredible! I wonder if Darshan has ever seen such a thing?”
Tanis eyed him fretfully.
Pelas noted his frightened look. “I find you uniquely interesting, little spy,” he admitted by way of reassuring him that he wasn’t going to kill him right away. “But you must let me touch you like that from time to time, for I find it such an impossibility that I have to remind myself that in fact you do exist.”
Thunder sounded outside, closer than before. Tanis looked out and saw a shock of lightning seem to strike the sea. Another rumble soon followed. He hugged his arms to his chest. “Why don’t the Fhorgs eat with you, sir?”
Pelas grunted. “They are all my brother’s spies, though only one was bold enough to claim it, and you saw how he fared. The others are more prudent.”
It was such a strange concept that Tanis couldn’t help but ask, “Why does your brother spy on you?”
“Clearly he doesn’t trust me. Why else?”
“Trust you with what?”
Pelas shrugged.
“Darshan fashions himself our leader, and being that he is older than I, he concludes this makes him twice my superior.” Pelas eyed him narrowly and remarked, “My brother is a consummate prick. Pray you never cross paths with him. He has a particular fascination with truthreaders.”
Tanis swallowed, for he heard more than Pelas had probably intended in his words. “You mean…” he braved in a small voice, “you mean the way you’re attracted to Healers?”
Pelas settled him a telling look. “In a very deadly way, yes.”
“But why?” The words came out in a plea, for these ideas frightened him. He remembered all too clearly the man Pelas had been the night before, and here he sat with him at a table in the dark—it was like a nightmare story! His heart beat an unhealthy patter, and panic simmered at the fringes of his thoughts.
“We are what we are,” Pelas mused. He waved a hand in annoyance as he remarked, “Darshan has expansive theories and dwells upon our nature incessantly. Purpose! Purpose! Phsaw!” he spat. “Purpose is. It doesn’t change, and it isn’t imperiled simply because I choose to amuse myself with other diversions. There are things to be observed about this world before we destroy it. Darshan doesn’t understand the value of that, but observation…experience in new and varied ways…these things do have value. I have tried to make him understand this.”
Tanis sort of stared at him feeling more than a little sick. “How can you say that,” he asked meekly, trying not to cry, “and then just…just slaughter innocent people?”
Pelas looked at him strangely. “You are all dead already, little spy. You just don’t know it.”
“We’re not dead!”
“But of course you are.” Pelas placed his icy hand on Tanis’s and leaned toward him, but there was only instruction in his tone as he explained, “All your lives are aimed in but one direction: death. Everything that comes between is simply delaying the inevitable. All your talk of feelings—your ‘honor this’ and ‘love that’—naught but illusions, little spy. Your greatest impulse is towards death, and you hurtle yourselves toward it relentlessly.”
This viewpoint was so antipathetic to everything Tanis had ever known that he just gaped at the man.
Pelas leaned back, releasing his hand. “I thought you understood,” he said, looking puzzled. “Last night…you killed her. Not I.”
“Because you were torturing her!” Tanis wailed. He glared hurtfully at Pelas while trying to rub some feeling back into his hand.
“Pain is but one expression of the inevitable end. It needn’t be abhorrent. It can even be a release for some.”
“It wasn’t a release for Camilla!” Tanis blurted, nearly in tears.
Pelas frowned at him. “I can see that her fate truly disturbs you. I do not understand this reaction, but I admit it intrigues me.” He drew in his breath and let it out slowly. “A Healer’s blood speaks to me,” he said after a moment, referencing Tanis’s earlier question. “Even without the work I do for my brother in search of this pattern, their blood would call me inexorably forth. And when I find such women…” he paused, frowned, and Tanis felt a terrible darkness filling the silence of Pelas’s thoughts. The enormity of it made him shudder. Suddenly Pelas gave him a tragic smile, and the darkness dissipated as he confessed, “I cannot help this nature any more than you can change being a truthreader.”
“You still have a choice,” Tanis pointed out timidly, feeling terribly overwhelmed by the horrific truths becoming clear to him.
“Choice is but an illusion,” Pelas replied, and there was a remorselessness in his tone that was dreadful to behold. “One of many such illusions. You will see this too, eventually.” Then his expression lightened, became even…amiable. “But off with you now. Back to your room for tonight. Tomorrow we will see about something else to wear. I can’t take you anywhere looking like that, all covered in…Camilla,” and he waved nebulously at Tanis’s blood-drenched clothes.
Tanis cringed at his callous words, but he did as Pelas bade him. Yet as he was leaving, the man’s parting comment set him such a chill that he was well in bed beneath his covers before it finally left him.
As Tanis was walking away, he heard Pelas observe thoughtfully, “I’ve never had my own truthreader before.”
It was storming when Tanis woke, the rain falling in great sheets and rivulets running down his window pane. His room was very cold, but Tanis was loath to don again his soiled clothing, which lay in a pile on the floor. He wrapped himself in his blanket instead and walked to the window to look out into the morning’s storm. Beneath him, waves battered the rocks, churning foam, and the wind, lacking any decent target upon the barren land, whipped and tore at the water.
Its violent nature made him think of Pelas.
Tanis thought he might be starting to understand his captor better, though the understanding brought no comfort. Something in Pelas’s nature compelled him to seek out Healers and destroy them, but he was also searching for a pattern that would help him and his brothers unmake their world.
The very idea of this made Tanis sick with fear. He only hoped no such pattern truly existed. From everything Master O’reith had taught him, it didn’t seem possible that such a pattern could be found even if it did exist, for it would be too vast to be held within the ken of a single man—or even a few men. This seemed elementary…but then, why did Pelas think there was such a pattern, and why would he think it could be found in the blood of Healers?
As thunder reverberated overhead, rattling the windowpanes, Tanis reflected on his grim thoughts. He had unexpectedly involved himself in a conflict that was far above his understanding. He thought of Prince Ean and the terrible guilt he harbored over his own path. His prince, too, had been caught in a battle between forces greater than him, and he’d nearly died as a result.
Tanis felt a lump forming in his throat with these memories, and he decided not to think about Prince Ean just then. He didn’t know if his prince lived or not, and he didn’t think he could bear any more fear on top of what he already shouldered.
Still, thoughts of Ean reminded Tanis of the terrible man who’d come to their camp, who might’ve signaled the end of them all if not for the zanthyr’s quick protection. And that’s when it occurred to him—amid a shock of gooseflesh that striped him from head to toe—that the dark-eyed stranger must also have been Malorin’athgul. The man had something of the look of Pelas, now that Tanis thought about it. Which brought another terrible question to mind.
Just how many brothers did Pelas have?
Abruptly the door of his room banged open, and a Fhorg stood in the doorway. “Let’s go, spy.”
Lest he rouse the Wildling’s ire, Tanis quickly grabbed his boots and followed the Fhorg from the room. “I’m not a spy, you know,” he grumbled under his breath as he followed him down the passage, for it had been a rotten morning so far, full of ugly truths.
The Fhorg cast him a dubious eye. “What mission are ye upon then, if not spy’n?”
Tanis was about to answer ‘none,’ but he surprisingly couldn’t make the word cross his tongue. It startled him to realize this, and to cover his dismay, he answered, “I serve a prince.”
“Oh aye? Which one?”
“The Prince of Dannym.”
The Fhorg shot him a wry look. “Serving him well, are ye?”
Tanis dropped his head. “No,” he admitted. “I…snuck away to follow Pelas. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Oh aye,” the Fhorg agreed with a grin, “clearly ye weren’t. Lucky ye are t’was Lord Pelas ye chose to follow ‘stead of his brother Darshan.”
“Yes,” Tanis muttered, “so he told me.”
The Fhorg led him to the second floor of the sprawling manor and down a hallway where the rooms were larger and more elegantly appointed. He paused before an open doorway. “In there y’go. Yer new room. Off w’ye now.”
Tanis headed inside a sitting room with a small balcony that fronted the sea and the storm. A serving woman was just coming o
ut of his bed chamber as Tanis reached the door, and she pointed inside and nodded, saying something in a language that sounded, to Tanis’s uneducated ear, like some dialect of Agasi. He walked in the direction of her pointing finger and found a hot bath had been drawn and a fire burning in the hearth.
I suppose a nice bedroom is the reward for becoming Pelas’s new truthreader, the lad thought with a fearful shudder.
The idea really made him cold inside.
Tanis quickly climbed into the tub. He didn’t even mind that the water was scalding enough to turn his skin pink. He was still soaking when the maidservant returned carrying a bundle of packages. Leaving him to his bath, she went about her business in an orderly fashion, unwrapping each of the bundles and hanging the clothes they contained in the armoire. She laid out an outfit upon the bed, draped a robe over a chair for him, and gave him a naughty wink as she left.
He blushed a little in spite of himself.
When his skin was as wrinkled and shriveled as a prune and he’d scrubbed away all the detritus from his first hellish confrontation with Pelas, Tanis reluctantly climbed out of the tub. He reflected that it was nice to feel clean. His lady was always going on about bathing, but Tanis had never truly appreciated the benefits of hot water until he’d had to scrub off three-day-old blood.
Then he shuddered at his own grim thoughts.
The maidservant had chosen a fine silk shirt and wool pants for him, but the jacket really caught his attention. It was as fine as the beautiful coat Prince Ean had given him, though very different in style. The brown damask silk was woven in a recurring fleur de lis pattern, and the sleeves were belled like Pelas’s own coat. The bottom hem flared slightly, and when Tanis put it on, it fit him almost too well. This was definitely not a coat for everyday use, which only made the boy more uneasy wondering what Pelas had in store for him that day.
Tanis had just managed to get a comb through his dark blonde hair, which he admitted was getting long and a bit shaggy, when Pelas came in. He wore his shiny black hair pulled back into a plaited club at the base of his neck and looked incredibly sophisticated and refined.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 11