The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light)

by McPhail, Melissa

  “Have you ever seen the Sormitáge, little spy?” he asked as they were walking past a series of paintings depicting famous bridges of the realm.

  “No sir.”

  “The Sormitáge’s great museum, the Primär Insamling, is five times the size of this guild hall. The Sormitáge encompasses thirty buildings this size or larger and is nearly a city unto itself. It is worth seeing, if you should find yourself in Faroqhar.”

  Tanis noted the passion with which Pelas spoke of the famous university and wondered why it hadn’t been on their visiting list early on. He was savvy enough, however, to recognize there was probably a reason they’d stayed away, and it was one the man clearly did not want to speak upon.

  Afternoon had come by the time they rejoined the festivities out in the streets of Rimaldi, and Tanis was famished. Pelas was ever amused at the size of the lad’s stomach, but he humored him and miraculously procured seats at a crowded café along one side of a square.

  The large central fountain was jammed with people splashing in its waters, while further across the square a Kings tournament was being held, with men and women hovering intently over the black and white boards in three long rows while crowds of supporters watched and joked and drank and generally disrupted concentration for all involved. The rest of the square saw all manner of activity, from lovers to acrobats to good-natured brawlers.

  The table Pelas had found for them was shaded by trees studded with tiny oranges, the limbs trained over a sprawling arbor that ran all along one side of the square. Pelas ordered food for Tanis in the Rimaldian dialect, and wine for both of them, and they sat for easily an hour just observing the unbelievable variety of revelry all around.

  “Tell me of your life, Tanis,” Pelas said after a while. He was sitting crosswise in his chair with long legs extended, one arm draped over the back and the other idly holding his goblet of wine. “What do you do when you are not following incredibly dangerous men about the realm?”

  “I was training as a truthreader before my lady and I left Calgaryn,” the lad said. “We’d been traveling lately with Prince Ean, as I told you.”

  “Upon a perilous quest as he ran for his life,” Pelas supplied with a dangerous glint in his eyes.

  Tanis gave him a wary look, because he’d never said such as that.

  Pelas held his gaze. “I asked my brother Shail about Ean val Lorian,” he explained, and then he added darkly, “He had much to say.”

  Tanis was suddenly dry-mouthed and apprehensive.

  Pelas laughed at his frightened expression and reached over to muss his hair. “Fear not, little spy!” he declared, still laughing. “If any of my brothers speak vehemently against a man, he is most certainly a man I want to meet.”

  Tanis looked at his hands still feeling unnerved. “I think it was one of your brothers who came to our camp one night. We saw him, but…but he didn’t see us.”

  Pelas arched brows. “That would be something indeed. However did your prince accomplish such a feat?”

  “He had help.”

  “Ah…” Pelas gave him a curious look, but there was also something deeply knowing in his gaze. Tanis worried he was beginning to suspect Phaedor’s nature, and then he wondered why that worried him.

  “So what does one study as a truthreader?” Pelas asked, returning them to safer waters.

  “A lot of endless rules,” Tanis grumbled. Then he grinned sheepishly. “I’ve only been studying for a year or so. I’ve learned my Truths and the basics of our craft, how to do Readings and Tellings and such.”

  “Which are?”

  “When you enter rapport with another’s mind and…and well, you look for stuff—memories and the like.”

  “I see.” He smiled. “Anything else you’ve learned, oh truthreader-in-training?”

  “Well…Master O’reith had begun training me in Truth-bindings.”

  Pelas latched onto this. “What bindings are these?”

  “Fourth-strand patterns can be used to keep a man from speaking about certain things,” Tanis explained.

  “These fourth-strand patterns,” Pelas mused, “they compel the energy of thought, do they not?”

  “Yes, sir. From everything I understand about them.”

  “Are these the same kind of patterns you mentioned in use upon the Marquiin?”

  “They could be, I suppose. I really understood so little about what happened to that man—but the fourth can be used to compel people against their will. It’s…” he dropped his gaze, suddenly embarrassed.

  Pelas leaned forward and gave him a shadowy look, suspecting his hesitation. “It’s what?”

  Tanis looked back to him and braved, “Well…it’s just that I think you work the fourth yourself sometimes and just don’t know it.”

  Pelas sat back in his chair looking amazed. “You think I work the fourth?”

  “The feeling is the same, sir. I’ve been under compulsion many times from Master O’reith as part of my training, and I’ve…well, I’ve been under compulsion from you. It felt the same, except…well…”

  Pelas waved at him, grinning. “Go on then. You can’t stop now.”

  Tanis managed a sheepish look. “Well, yours was somehow…darker.”

  Pelas shook his head thoughtfully. “How very, very interesting.” He sipped his wine in pensive silence for a while, and Tanis was just beginning to think he’d escaped the conversation when Pelas leaned toward him again and placed a hand over his. “Tanis,” he said, using the intimacy of his name to draw the lad’s gaze to meet his own, “might you be able to work a Telling upon me?”

  Tanis naturally found this idea dismaying, for he knew the deadly power lurking in Pelas’s mind; yet how could he deny him something which clearly took such courage to ask? “I could try, sir,” he managed weakly.

  “And within this Telling,” Pelas continued intently, pinning the lad with his coppery gaze, “might you be able to see if someone had worked a compulsion pattern upon me?”

  Tanis went cold, and not because of Pelas’s icy hand holding so tightly to his.

  “Yes…” Pelas murmured and their eyes locked upon one another even as their minds met upon a single thought.

  Tanis forced a swallow, for two things became clear in that moment. First, he had to do this for Pelas; and second, this kind of a working would cause a shift in the currents of elae, and as soon as he did that…

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. Yet the duplicity in this action made the boy heartsick—even though Pelas had asked it of him, even though Tanis had to do it, it would also act as his card of calling upon the currents of elae, shouting his presence to the zanthyr.

  Suddenly overcome with sorrow, Tanis murmured, “Close your eyes, sir.”

  Pelas did.

  Tanis lifted his hand to find the handhold, but for a moment he just froze. Here was this man—this powerful, wonderful and decidedly deadly man—who was submitting wholly to his will, who was trusting to him so completely as to place his entire mind within Tanis’s full control.

  The lad felt such a weight of responsibility in that moment that for a brief time he didn’t know if he could go through with it. But then he reminded himself of all of the good that was in Pelas and how important this was, and he placed his fingers across his face and temples as he’d been taught.

  It was surprisingly simple to find rapport with Pelas, and not merely because the man was so easily and willingly allowing him into his mind. No, it was like…like they were somehow of the same cloth—as outrageous as that was, for Tanis knew they were not even of the same race. Yet there it was.

  Sinking deeper into rapport, Tanis was about to tell Pelas what to look for when he felt his mind opening yet again.

  He heard me, the boy realized, startled that they were already so deep in rapport as to share their thoughts.

  But when Pelas opened his mind fully to Tanis…

  The boy started as if a static shock had just thrilled through
him, for he saw what he knew had been true all along. There was no other way to describe the way elae collected around Pelas’s mental energy, around his thoughts, ready to comply to his intent. He was able to use the fourth strand, and that could only mean one thing.

  The lad shuttered his excitement at this discovery, however, for he’d yet to do as Pelas had so humbly asked of him. Though it still frightened him immensely, Tanis mentally told Pelas where to direct his attention. No sooner did he have the thought than the man obediently looked there, and—

  It was as though the night opened up, and huge billowing clouds of darkness came gushing out. It was so akin to the storm in Piper’s mind that Tanis had to grit his teeth and forcibly make himself stay in rapport to explore the darkness. He soon shook with the effort, and his head began to pound painfully, but though he tried as hard as he could, Tanis was unable to penetrate that darkness.

  Finally he withdrew.

  Pelas opened his eyes, and their gazes locked again.

  “Did you see what I saw?” Tanis asked weakly. He was startled and excited, terrified, anguished and heartbroken all in the same moment.

  “Yes…but you will have to explain to me what I saw.”

  Tanis pushed palms to his eyes, willing himself to hold it together, to push through these many emotions that seemed likely to strangle him. “You saw the energy collecting,” he whispered.

  “Is that what it was?”

  “What it was,” Tanis said, dropping his hands and leveling Pelas a tormented look, “was the fourth.”

  Pelas sat back and regarded him. “The fourth,” he mused, frowning ponderously. His gaze flicked back to Tanis. “What was it doing?”

  “Waiting,” Tanis groaned, for the knowledge nearly made him weep. “Pelas, sir,” the boy said as tears came to his eyes much against his will, for he understood too well now, and it was far more than he wanted to know. “You can work the fourth, and you have worked it, and that means you are like the zanthyr. You’re fifth-strand. You’re…” but he couldn’t say it, for it was too monumental to him.

  “We are…like you?” Pelas asked gently.

  Tanis nodded.

  Wearing an unreadable expression, Pelas leaned across the table and held a finger to Tanis’s cheek to capture a single tear. “Little spy,” he murmured, staring marvelously at the boy, “I think perhaps you cannot be human.”

  “I’m as human as you are,” Tanis protested without thinking, the words just tumbling out of him, for he was so overwhelmed. But once he’d said it, the lad wondered how he could’ve made such a claim. Moreover what did it actually meant that he could say it? Everyone knew truthreaders were incapable of lying, which meant…

  “And what of the patterns you spoke of?” Pelas asked, sitting back again.

  Tanis swallowed and shook his head. “I couldn’t see any patterns, but that darkness…did you see it?”

  He frowned. “No, I sensed you moving on through my thoughts, but I was somehow unable to follow.”

  “I don’t know if this will make sense to you,” Tanis told him, “but the dark storm I saw was very close to what I witnessed when I worked a Telling upon a boy who’d been tested for Bethamin’s Fire.” Tanis dropped his gaze to his hands. “Piper went mad from the Fire, so there was much more of his own insanity clouding his mind, but…but they were similar. I don’t know if that helps you at all.”

  Pelas was staring compellingly at him. “More than you could ever know,” he replied quietly after a moment.

  The silence stretched, each occupied with his own thoughts, until Tanis could stand no longer the secret he harbored. When he looked back to Pelas, the other’s gaze was still focused on him. “Sir,” the lad whispered, terribly disheartened and fretful now, “I…think I’m going to be leaving soon.”

  But Pelas merely smiled at him. “Then I suppose we shouldn’t keep sitting here or we will miss all of the fun.” He pushed out of his chair and spun to Tanis with a flourish, extending his hand toward the city at large. “Shall we away?”

  Looking at Pelas frozen in such an extravagant bow, with his sparkling eyes and devastating smile, Tanis decided he really loved this man.

  Thus they headed off together, with Pelas in surprisingly good spirits considering all they they’d just witnessed of each other’s minds. But Pelas wasn’t wont to dwell on things—this much Tanis knew of him—so he wasted no time on emotions that did not contribute to the gaiety he intended them to share that night.

  As ever, he was a force to be reckoned with as they headed down the streets, for people were ever attracted to him such that he was always stopping to greet someone new or pausing to clasp wrists with a man who thought somehow they’d met before.

  He was veritably accosted by anyone with something to sell, from street vendors to restaurateurs, courtesans to fortune tellers. He did stop to buy a handful of lovely flowers from a woman on a corner, and because she blushed so prettily and smiled so chastely though she was clearly no maiden, he blessed her with a piece of Agasi silver that would’ve bought her entire wagonload and more besides.

  By the time night fell, Tanis was heady from the sights and experiences as much as from the steady supply of wine that Pelas kept feeding him. Eventually they reached the central city square where the largest celebration was ongoing. A huge orchestra played atop a stage lit by iron braziers, and the entire plaza was alive with people dancing. Pelas laughed at Tanis’s marveling expression and pulled him across the pavement toward the center of the fabulous melee. The musicians finished a song, and as they were preparing for the next, everyone broke into four lines. Pelas pulled Tanis into line with him, and they faced two rosy-cheeked maidens across the way.

  “Do you dance, little spy?” Pelas asked into his ear, for it was quite loud in the square even without the musicians playing.

  “It’s a little late to ask me that, isn’t it?” Tanis protested, but he was giddy and excited and had all but forgotten that the zanthyr was very probably coming for him even then.

  As if by some unspoken command, the male line walked forward and bowed to the women. As Pelas was bowing to the two girls across from him and Tanis, he conjured flowers out of nowhere and handed one to each lass before their line retreated.

  The girls beamed at him.

  Tanis cast him a wondrous look. “Where did those come from?” he laughed. “You weren’t holding any flowers!”

  Pelas cast him a sideways grin. “The flower-seller. Remember?”

  “Yes, but I don’t recall your pushing flowers up your sleeve,” Tanis told him.

  Pelas gave him a peculiar look. “Why in heaven above would I put flowers up my sleeve?”

  Then the music started and the dance began, and Tanis added magician to Pelas’s ever growing list of talents.

  The men skipped forward and back, then the women did the same. The next time they met in the middle and linked arms, and so did the courtship of the dance begin. Forward and back, spinning and turning, linking arms and swapping imaginary kisses, on and on. And when that dance was done, another began.

  Pelas knew all of the dances.

  Whenever Tanis faltered upon a step, Pelas was there to encourage him on, and when the orchestra moved to playing music for partnered dances, he taught Tanis the steps with laughter and patience.

  So did they spend the Longest Night, and always when the dance led them to new partners, Pelas produced two new flowers, seemingly more lovely than the last. Tanis suspected that more than half the females in the plaza had a flower from him by the time the moon started falling in the west. He also imagined any one of them would have offered more than their hands for a dance had Pelas shown the least interest, but he only had eyes for dancing—and for keeping Tanis at his side whilst they did.

  The boy was happily struggling through the fairly difficult steps of a partnered jig when a flash of raven hair snared his eye. Tanis caught his breath and spun a look around, but the plaza was awash with dancers in an undulating sea
—heads bobbing, twisting, turning… Pelas had spun his most recent partner off onto a fast-turning caper that had the girl giggling hysterically as she tried to keep up. He was gazing kindly into her eyes but was relentlessly turning, turning...

  “Is something wrong, milord?” Tanis’s partner asked him. She was a sweet-tempered girl, and it was their second dance.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her as he gazed over her shoulder. His heart was racing for a different reason than the dance, and he knew he hadn’t imagined what he saw. Tanis met her gaze and squeezed her hands. “I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”

  She gave him a shy smile and then stood on tiptoes to plant a feather-light kiss upon his cheek. She blushed demurely as she pulled back, saying, “Thank you, milord, for the dance.”

  Tanis nodded to her, but then he was pushing through the crowd chasing after that flash of raven hair. It was almost as if Phaedor’s near presence pulled him unerringly forth, for he could not be averted from his path even if it meant breaking through the middle of a dancing pair.

  When the lad at last cleared the main celebration, he stood with his back to the sea of dancers and looked hurriedly around. There was a courtyard that branched off the plaza across the way, and somehow Tanis knew this was where he must go. He ran then, his excitement growing until he was sprinting flat out to reach the courtyard, and when he did…

  The zanthyr stood beside a gazebo in its center, an imposing shadow with emerald eyes.

  Tanis stormed into his arms. “You came!” he exclaimed, so impossibly elated to see him that all other thoughts and emotions were the flat shadows of midday beneath the dazzling sun.

  The zanthyr’s chuckle was the rumble of a lion’s purr, echoic of a growl. “I was just waiting for your call, lad,” he murmured, holding the boy close in his arms.

  Tanis was suddenly laughing and crying all at once. He’d never known such impossible joy as this reunion. Though they’d spent but a few weeks apart, it felt like years. But when the zanthyr patted him on the back in a certain meaningful way, Tanis felt the crushing weight of a hundred other emotions come barreling in upon him.