- A joke among zanthyrs
Raine and the gypsies reached the city of Renato in the late afternoon, emerging through arid foothills onto fertile plains where a sprawling walled city of plastered stone and terracotta nestled between river and hillside.
The first day of Adendigaeth had arrived, and the city was abuzz with preparations for the twelve-day festival, which was set to begin that evening with the First Lord’s Masquerade. Balearic had explained that the largest fete would be held at Björn’s palace in Niyadbakir, but the Governors of the five cities became extensions of the First Lord’s hospitality during Adendigaeth, and accordingly, to launch the festivities, they held a masquerade in all five cities of the realm.
As Raine and Carian arrived in Renato, the streets were jammed with people flooding in from the countryside to attend the fete. Many were already in costume, and revelers had begun spilling out of tavernas and cafés all over town, even as city crews still labored to string lanterns between rooftops or hang glass globes from trees and arbors.
The Iluminari had made camp on the outskirts of town at a site large enough for their wagons, so Balearic took Raine and Carian into the city on foot. As they reached the central piazza and its sprawling central fountain, with the Governor’s sun-gold palace rising four stories on the north side, Raine stopped suddenly, his diamondine gaze revealing his utter mystification.
Balearic came to a halt beside him, while the pirate swaggered over to the magnificent fountain, which was easily thirty paces in diameter, climbed in boots and all, and dunked his head under one of the downspouts.
“I just can’t believe it,” Raine said under his breath. The existence of so much, the commerce and prosperity, the masses of people living in a realm supposedly devoid of life—these truths dumbfounded him. Too, Raine found something eerily familiar about Renato, but he couldn’t place it was. It had been bothering him ever since he entered the city beneath one of seven towering arches, the arcade reminding him uncomfortably of Tiern’aval’s seaport. “Where did it all come from?” Raine muttered, more to himself than Balearic. “Where did these people come from?”
“Renato was the first city in T’khendar built by human hands,” Balearic offered. He stood relaxed with hands in his large pockets and grinning at the pirate, who had started splashing around in the fountain as if trying to catch a frog. “From what I hear, the city was constructed by the inhabitants of Tiern’aval and was raised from its ruins.”
Raine turned him a staggering look. His heart—having painfully stopped in that first instant Balearic said the words—was now racing as if to catch up with those lost moments. “What did you say?” he whispered severely.
“Tiern’aval,” Balearic repeated, missing Raine’s sudden change in manner, for his attention was fixed on the pirate instead. He continued absently, “As the story goes, when Malachai twisted the weld into the Citadel on Tiern’aval, the city was ripped here. It lay in ruins, however, so the First Lord gave the inhabitants unlimited support in rebuilding it.”
Raine felt immensely ill. “You’re telling me,” he said, forming the words with difficulty around the disbelief lodged in his throat, “that we’re standing on the rebuilt ruins of Cair Tiern’aval?”
“Aye,” Balearic said. He gave the Vestal a sideways look full of meaning.
Raine turned away from the gypsy, for he feared a certain lack of composure overcoming him. He pushed hands into his pockets and clenched his jaw and tried to balance the forces of disbelief and horror that were attacking him. After a moment, he made up his mind upon a course of action. “Excuse me, Balearic,” he murmured, and he set off across the square towards the Governor’s palace.
“Hey!” Carian shouted from the fountain. He leaped over the rim and sloshed across the plaza toward Raine. “Hey,” the pirate said again, snaring Raine by the sleeve so that he had to stop and turn to face him. “Just where’re you going, poppet? I thought we were here to find a Healer for Birdie?”
Raine exhaled a long sigh. “No doubt Balearic will follow through on that promise,” he heard himself say, only half-aware of the conversation at all. “I have something I…need to do.” He turned away from the pirate and headed on.
“So, we’ll meet you back at camp then,” Carian called after him, sounding annoyed.
The Vestal had already forgotten he was there.
Raine D’Lacourte had long suspected that Björn van Gelderan held all the answers—yea, he had relentlessly accused the man of hoarding them like the proverbial jewels in a dragon’s lair. Yet it was one thing to suspect such—for the accusation carried a heavy dose of remonstration and blame—and quite another to realize it had been entirely true.
All of the questions he’d been asking for so long…clearly there were answers. Somehow in the intervening years, Raine had fallen into apathy about answers even existing. He’d just blamed Björn for having them without considering that he actually did. Meanwhile, many of the ‘answers’ he and Alshiba had decided upon had been naught but inventions, fabrications derived from their own failure to understand Björn’s motivations and actions.
This latter realization brought to light an uncomfortable truth: So long as Raine could blame Björn for some problem or circumstance, he didn’t himself have to be effective in handling it. In essence, he could use his oath-brother’s absence to justify all manner of his own failings. And had—for three hundred years.
That was a bitter pill, indeed.
It doesn’t excuse what he’s done, he reminded himself. Yet this accusation was growing pale, weakened by truths that denied the integrity of Raine’s invented explanations.
No, Raine was beginning to see—starting with Phaedor’s cutting remarks before he was even willing to believe Malorin’athgul existed, and following through what he’d learned about Isabel and the other Mages—that there was a vast canyon of truth between what he and Alshiba didn’t know and what Björn did.
Ruminating on these ill thoughts, Raine reached the Governor’s palace and headed up the wide stairs leading to the entrance. The doors stood open to allow the various crews easy access, and a constant flow of men and women flooded in and out, ostensibly setting up for the ball. Raine made his way inside following four men who labored beneath an ice sculpture of a giant bird, but he broke away as they were met by an imperious-looking woman in a black dress.
Two corridors led to left and right, branching off the grand foyer. The left looked less crowded, so Raine headed down the left-hand passage and opened his mind to the host of thoughts drifting on the currents, listening, sifting…
He could learn much just by listening. Most people didn’t realize their thoughts had force, that the energy associated with the process of thought was naturally carried upon the currents of elae. More often than not, Raine didn’t need to use his talent to delve into the minds of others, for their thoughts were shouted loudly upon the tides.
As he walked the long hall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor, Raine heard all of the myriad voices one might imagine on a day like that. Impatient thoughts, anxious thoughts, excited thoughts—many of these—but there were a select few mental voices he specifically listened for…voices he hadn’t heard in centuries, voices he would know anywhere. And eventually, one floated to him, though it was by far the last one he’d expected to hear.
Cristien Tagliaferro!
The voice of Cristien’s thoughts was as unmistakable as the pain of hearing them was palpable, for Raine had shared minds with Cristien the way only two truthreaders as closest friends might. The sound of Cristien’s thoughts pierced Raine’s heart and stole his breath, the bolt of recognition bringing him to a standstill in the middle of the corridor, half bent and bewildered.
How are you alive at all, my friend? I thought you were long taken from us…
Of anyone, Raine had mourned Cristien’s loss the hardest.
Dreading the confrontation to come now, Raine swallowed against a sudden ill feeling i
n his stomach and pressed slowly on, following Cristien’s energy upcurrent to the source, to the man.
He found him standing on the steps of a large gazebo talking to a Shade. Cristien’s curly brown hair hung in his eyes, as unkempt as ever, and his square jaw and cleft chin were likewise in need of a shave, but he seemed otherwise unchanged. Every aspect of his lean form was as Raine remembered. Behind Cristien, an orchestra was rehearsing, the conductor clapping the beat of a complicated rhythm that the flutists seemed to be having trouble keeping up with.
Cristien and the Shade both turned to Raine the instant he stepped out of the loggia into the sun, as if his presence had immediately registered in their minds with shocking force. Raine felt Cristien’s colorless eyes pinned expertly upon him, and realized that his own troubled thoughts had likely been speaking louder than he’d intended.
For a moment the two truthreaders stood locked in each other’s gaze, and Raine felt the energy building between them, taut as a violinist’s strings. Then Cristien was launching toward him, and before Raine knew it, Cristien had grabbed him into an embrace. “Epiphany bless the day!” Cristien laughed as he hugged Raine close and clapped him on the back with verve. “Have you finally seen the light?”
“Cristien,” Raine said quietly, the hurt too raw in his tone.
“Ah, Cephrael, no…” the other truthreader remarked, pulling away to take Raine by the shoulders instead. He searched Raine’s eyes with his own, and gaining understanding, dropped his arms and took a step backwards. “My, what a hurricane of thoughts. What are you doing here then, Raine? After all this time?”
Raine shook his head. “I don’t really know…yet.”
“I see,” Cristien said, though he clearly didn’t.
To Raine, it seemed he was staring at a ghost. A vast emptiness spread inside him where delight should’ve blossomed, but rather than rejoicing in the certain knowledge that his dear friend lived, instead he only felt betrayed.
Perceptive to Raine’s thoughts, Cristien’s brow furrowed and his eyes grew distant. “It was quite impossible, you know,” he said, backing further off to stand his own ground, an invisible line now drawn between them, between their loyalties, between the conflicting truths they each held inviolate.
Raine held his friend’s gaze, two pairs of diamondine eyes pinned on each other from very different faces, one square and masculine with deep-set eyes and a poet’s sensuous mouth, the other softly handsome but tormented beyond measure. “What was impossible?” Raine inquired tightly, his angst building.
“Contacting anyone,” Cristien said, clearly defensive. “In the early days the realm was too unstable for communication with Alorin. Deyjiin roamed freely here, wreaking havoc. It took the better part of half a century to cleanse the realm of it. And by then? What mercy to tell anyone, even had I the wherewithal to rejoin their lives? Things lost could never be regained. Everyone I’d known and loved had mourned me and moved on five decades in the past.” He shook the hair from his eyes with a practiced toss of his head and implored Raine with his gaze. “It was a new world by then, a new time. Life moved on without me, Raine.”
Some of us did not.
Cristien shot him a tormented look, too keen to Raine’s mind for even unspoken thoughts to go unheard, even after all that time.
Raine regarded him gravely. He had a thousand questions. Disappointingly, his pettiest one made it to the forefront first. “Were you always sworn to him, Cristien?” A bitter question full of hurt.
“Raine, that’s not fair.”
“Cristien Tagliaferro sits upon the Council of Nine,” said a voice from beside them, and Raine tore his eyes away from Cristien’s to find the Shade standing there. “So has it always been, so will it always be.”
Raine turned back to Cristien, who was looking dismayed.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the Shade asked then.
Holding Cristien’s gaze again, Raine said heatedly, “I confess my attention is fixed on another.”
“I am Anglar.”
That got Raine’s attention in true. He looked to the Shade and declared, “Anglar Tempest died in the Citadel.” For a moment Raine was stunned to silence just staring at the man, but then he recognized Anglar’s familiar features, albeit now encased in unearthly chrome. “How?” Raine was suddenly desperate to understand. “Anglar, why this?”
“There is much you don’t know about the Battle of the Citadel,” Anglar’s Shade replied in that solemn, staid manner all Shades seemed to possess. “I made a choice then that cost me my life. The First Lord offered me a different path, and I took it.”
“Anglar is the Governor of Renato,” Cristien advised quietly, still clearly upset by Raine’s continuing discord. “We…” He dropped his gaze for a moment and then lifted diamondine eyes back to Raine, suddenly resolute. “We both sit upon Björn’s council. So has it been for longer than I care to recall.”
“Even before the war,” Raine concluded, feeling bereft as he stared at his friend. That they had shared so much with one another yet never this secret…it was a crushing blow.
“Why did you come here, Raine?” Cristien asked again, frowning at him with concern and consternation both. “Were you looking for me?”
“I didn’t know you lived,” Raine answered hollowly. He felt like the entire world was floating away, like there was nothing to hold onto, no truth to ground him. “I was just listening for a voice I recognized and I knew the governors were…” but he couldn’t finish. Instead he fixed Cristien with an agonized look. “I never expected to hear your thoughts.”
“Raine…”
Suddenly the numb disbelief vanished, replaced by fury. “Damn it, Cristien, why? Why did you side with him? Why then? Why now? What really happened at the Citadel?”
Cristien regarded him with sorrow and obligation equally consuming his thoughts, the force of these feelings cascading into Raine’s awareness such that he was required to confront them too. “I’m not the one you need to hear this from, Raine,” Cristien said then. “Ask yourself, would you believe anything I told you?”
Raine held his gaze tightly, his jaw locked, teeth clenching and unclenching. Cristien was right. Raine wasn’t likely to believe anything the man said now.
“Who would you believe?” Cristien asked then, beseeching Raine’s understanding with his eyes, with the thoughts he willed the other to hear. They were two truthreaders, each with his own side of the same truth.
Raine looked away. He knew what Cristien expected. He just wasn’t sure if he was willing to do it. He turned his diamondine gaze on the Shade instead. “Anglar, you were at the Citadel. Will you tell me nothing of what transpired?”
“It is not my truth to tell,” the Shade said simply.
Raine looked back to his friend, disappointed but unsurprised. “Very well. Good-bye then, Cristien, Anglar.” He turned to leave the way he’d come.
“Raine—wait,” Cristien called after him. Raine could feel the remorse in his thoughts, saw the memories Cristien pushed toward him that he might remember their years of camaraderie and trust.
“No,” he said without turning, feeling the force of the man’s gaze upon his back as fully as the power of his thoughts. They stirred memories long forgotten, but so also brought painful feelings better left buried. “No…it is as you said, Cristien,” Raine concluded quietly. “Things lost can never be regained.”
Raine took his time getting back to the gypsy camp, walking Renato’s streets as twilight came and dimmed to dusk, as the city came alive in the night. He walked down boulevards crowded with masked revelers, with two-headed dragons and mythological gods, with fabled creatures and famous heroes—countless masks each carrying their own story, either imagined or true. Yet on that night, for the First Lord’s Masquerade, all stories were real, each mask brought to brief but vivid life by the reveler who wore it, acting out the role it was meant to represent, a single face sometimes symbolic of so much.
Raine w
alked with shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets and his fingers wrapped around Björn’s coin, and he thought of Cristien.
They might’ve been brothers, they were once so close. Their years in the Sormitáge had united them through trial and toil as much as through the laughter of long nights and even longer examinations. Raine always felt that Cristien was the stronger of them, though their talent had been matched. But Cristien had always been adventurous—courageous even—willing to explore philosophies and ideas that Raine found uncomfortable because they were too far afield of empirical truths, too close to the purity of faith. He recalled being startled when Björn had asked him to take the Vestal oath instead of Cristien. But now he understood better.
Since the beginning, Raine thought, shaking his head bitterly, his stomach turning with the knowledge. Cristien had been Björn’s since the very start, since they left the Sormitáge together in search of their own paths.
But if Björn didn’t trust me into his council even then, why ask me to Vestal the realm?
So much about Björn van Gelderan fell beyond Raine’s ken.
Perhaps that’s why, he thought then. Because he never could understand Björn—not then, perhaps not ever.
And Dagmar? Alshiba? Why hadn’t Björn trusted them?
Raine was still sifting through these painful and troubling questions when he reached the gypsy camp. The firelight drew him as truly as the music and cheering might’ve, and he passed through the ring of wagons to find the camp alive with dancing and merriment. The pirate seemed to be at the center of the frivolity, cavorting like a long-legged spider, his waist-length hair wild as he danced, its wavy strands floating on the wind mimicking the smoke rising from the campfires.
For a moment as he watched Carian, Raine wished he might find such release himself. To be able to let go of these many threads, to find peace within, no matter what condition the world at large.
But he couldn’t. The hundreds of threads he held in his mind connected a vast pattern that as yet remained unclear. He honestly feared if he released any one thread, the entire pattern would unravel, and everything he’d worked so hard to gather and understand would be lost.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 24