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

by McPhail, Melissa

  Alyneri came down the steps looking amazing in a deep blue desert gown and matching cloak, her long hair capped with a net of garnets. The more Trell looked upon her in such desert finery, the more he saw her own natural beauty shine forth.

  The idea reminded him of the silverback gorilla he’d once had the privilege—and thrill—of observing while traveling with Ware in the jungles of Bemoth. The creature in any other setting would’ve seemed shocking, a twisted parody of a man. But in its own habitat, it was majestic. Then he smiled slightly to himself at the thought. Alyneri would’ve been mortified to think he’d compared her to a gorilla.

  Their eyes met as she reached the last step, her expression attentive to his mood, her eyes eager for a chance to explain, but this was neither the time nor the place. Too, a part of him wanted her to know that she’d hurt him deeply, wanted her to feel the same pain and uncertainty he felt, that she might never keep such things from him again. So he shook his head slightly.

  She dropped her gaze and moved off to her horse, and in the turn of her shoulder, an unexpected wall formed between them. Suddenly Alyneri seemed as inaccessible as the stars. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected in wounding her in return, but he realized too late that the effect was far more destructive than he’d intended. He turned to Gendaia with teeth clenched.

  Fynn and Brody joined them in the last, the latter coming out with a sack over his shoulder that clinked and clanked with the sound of glass. “Be careful with that!” Fynn hissed as Brody slung the bag over the back of Fynn’s horse. “You’ve got all the grace of a bloody ogre!”

  “An ogre would as soon eat you as carry out the bag of wine you’re still too drunk to manage yourself,” Brody pointed out unrepentantly.

  Fynn gave him a sooty look. “I might be better off if it did.”

  “Is your conscience speaking too loudly this morning, Fynnlar?” Alyneri asked. She affected a cheerful demeanor before the others, but Trell easily saw the lingering hurt behind her gaze.

  “Your Grace, I thought we ascertained long ago that I have no conscience to speak of,” Fynn remarked while trying to mount his horse. He managed it awkwardly on the third attempt.

  “I haven’t given up hoping that your soul might yet find salvation.”

  “A conscience is hardly a guarantee of salvation, your Grace,” Fynn pointed out once he’d found his way into the saddle. “In fact, I rather think it’s our consciences that do us in. What need have we of salvation unless we have a conscience to begin with? A free man is one who cares for nothing.”

  “Yes, I’ve met many such men in his majesty’s prison,” Rhys remarked.

  Fynn gave the captain a look of onerous indignation.

  Alyneri’s gaze took in all of the horses and pack animals and she turned a frown to Rhys. “Lord Captain…what of Caldar? Where is Ean’s horse?”

  Rhys harrumphed disagreeably, wherein Cayal answered, “We think the zanthyr took him, your Grace. The horse vanished from his stall the same night Phaedor left.”

  “I see.”

  So did Trell. From all he’d heard of the First Lord’s zanthyr, he was beginning to wonder if the man didn’t have the same prescience as Balaji—ever hinting at things to come.

  They set off soon thereafter, making their slow way through the still-reveling city toward the Espial’s Guild Hall on Faring East. Two hours later they reached the massive building, which dominated an entire city block. Fynn led them into a large court bordered by four arched tunnels, each of which branched into further courtyards.

  The Guild Master soon emerged to greet them. A rotund, bearded man of middle years, he wore an elaborate chain draped from shoulder to shoulder but seemed most proud of the two thin gold rings cinching the fat pointer finger of his right hand.

  “He’s an Espial of the second degree,” Alyneri noted as the man was greeting Fynn. Trell turned to her, and she explained, “The two gold rings mean he trained at the Sormitáge and achieved the second level of mastery in his craft—quite an accomplishment.”

  Trell noted the rings as much as Alyneri’s wistful tone, which he found puzzling. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen anyone else wearing such rings. The drachwyr’s only accoutrements had been ebon-enameled nails, and certainly Carian hadn’t worn one. But then, Trell recalled that the pirate had frowned upon an Espial’s life, talking about them as ‘kept pets,’ and he’d scoffed at training at the Sormitáge.

  Just then Fynn waved Trell over to join them, whereupon the royal cousin introduced, “Trell, meet Norit D’varre, Guild Master of Rethynnea. D’varre, may I present my cousin, Trell.”

  As their gazes met, the Guild Master connected Fynn’s introduction with Trell’s name. His pudgy eyes widened. “You—” the man stammered, “but—I thought you were dead!”

  “Yes,” Trell muttered, “I get that a lot.”

  D’varre turned to Fynn looking uneasy. “You said it was just the Duchess traveling with you and your men.”

  “Trell is one of my men,” Fynn muttered. He looked like he really wanted a drink and kept glancing longingly at the sack on the back of his horse. He waved nebulously at Trell. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

  D’varre looked discomfited, and Trell wondered why the news of his identity so troubled the Adept. He regarded the Guild Master suspiciously as D’varre signaled to a man standing in the shadows next to a horse.

  The Guild Master patted his brow with a kerchief and looked back to Fynn. “Regarding the terms of your contract, my lord…”

  “What? What?” Fynn pressed impatiently.

  “As I explained to you upon our initial meeting, it’s too dangerous to travel the nodes directly into Tal’Shira. Radov is terrified of invasion from the Khurds and has set Saldarians to guarding the known nodes—most of whom shoot on sight without bothering to ascertain friend from foe. The Guild has suffered some losses and will not risk the node again.”

  “Yes, you told me all of this already. What’s your plan—just spit it out, D’varre.”

  D’varre tugged at his waistcoat straining around gilded buttons. “Gerard here must take you across three nodes to bring you within a day’s ride of Tal’Shira,” he said, indicating the man who’d just joined them. He pinned Fynn with a highly significant look. “Two of these nodes are in Akkad-held lands. Very dangerous.”

  “If this is about upping your fee—”

  “I mean only to think of your welfare, my lord,” D’varre insisted, aiming a confusing glance at Trell. “Are you certain you will not reconsider traveling via the weld in Tregarion instead? This would bring you into Kandori and—”

  “Cost half the Kandori fortune to do it!” Fynn objected shrilly. “No, we’ll take the route you’ve planned for us. Give me the bloody paper to sign and let’s be done with this. The sooner we get moving the better.”

  Which statement Trell interpreted to mean, the sooner I get out of here, the safer I’ll be.

  D’varre mopped his brow with his handkerchief again and motioned for a clerk, who trotted forward with parchment and quill. Scowling, Fynn placed his incomprehensible scrawl across it.

  “You will note upon the contract that I have advised them of the danger in choosing this route,” D’varre said to the clerk, who made the appropriate notation and rushed off again.

  The Guild Master looked to Fynn and then to Trell and forced a smile. “Very well, my lords. I leave you in Gerard’s capable hands.” With that, he bowed and left them as hastily as his bulk allowed, leaving Trell to wonder what secret he’d escaped with back into the dim recesses of his Hall.

  Gerard meanwhile scanned the assembled group, apparently counting heads. He was a thin fellow with a nose that seemed to have been gifted with the face’s full complement of prominence and a chin that had received none. Trell noted the single, etched gold band on his right pointer finger and made a mental note to start noticing such rings now that he knew their significance.

  “Very well,” the Espial said in
a deeply resonant tenor that belied his understated build and generally unimpressive countenance. “Let us be off.”

  The node lay at the center of another courtyard and was demarcated by a wide, banded circle of cobalt, silver and garnet tiles. Trell noted that the colors mirrored the famous columns along Rethynnea’s harbor Thoroughfare, but he couldn’t help comparing the great circle to a bull’s-eye. His gaze strayed to the rooftops, the seasoned soldier in him too wary of archers to blithely place himself upon such an obvious target.

  The Espial led his own horse to the middle of the garnet circle and stopped. “I stand here,” Gerard told them all, spreading his hands to indicate his current position, “holding open the node. You cross here,” and he pointed to the red tiles in the center of the bull’s-eye, “and keep walking toward the edge. There are many of you who need to cross, so please do not merely stop the moment you emerge on the other side.”

  “What do you mean ‘the edge?’” Rhys asked.

  “You will know it,” Gerard assured him in his booming voice. “Do not continue past the edge.”

  “Duly noted,” Fynn muttered. “Stop before you walk off The Edge. Can we go now?”

  Gerard settled him a disapproving look. “A moment, please, to prepare the node. Cyrene was not built in a day, my lord.”

  “No, but it fell in one,” Fynn pointed out disagreeably.

  “Once everyone is through,” Gerard told the group, patently ignoring Fynn now, “we will proceed to our next nodepoint. Do not proceed into the near city until I have joined you. The lands are perilous for unwary travelers.” With that, the Espial closed his eyes and ostensibly set to ‘preparing the node.’

  “As if we’d leave without him,” Fynn muttered.

  “What has you so worked up, Fynn?” Alyneri finally asked.

  But Trell remembered a comment Carian had made about traveling on nodes controlled by the Guild and thought he understood. “Just how much is this endeavor costing us, cousin?”

  Alyneri turned the royal cousin a swift look with the dawn of understanding infusing her expression. “Fynn—where did you get the money for all of us to travel this way?”

  “He borrowed it from Ghislain,” Brody the Bull rumbled.

  “Traitor,” Fynn hissed spectacularly at him.

  “No wonder you’re fleeing the kingdom,” Trell chuckled.

  “I am a free man to go where I please!” Fynn declared shrilly.

  “Until Ghislain gets her hands on you,” Brody pointed out.

  Fynn spun him a heated glare. “Whose side are you on?”

  “I serve my lord, Prince Ryan.”

  “Who would rather not see his only son in the clutches of that conniving black-widow of a siren!”

  “But surely she would hold nothing against you once you repay her,” Alyneri protested.

  “Yes, I think that’s the essence of the problem,” Trell noted with a quirk of a grin. “Fynn obviously has no intention of repaying her.”

  “The money was mine to begin with!” Fynn protested indignantly.

  “I don’t recall anyone forcing you to spend all your waking hours drinking her wine and playing Kings,” Rhys remarked.

  Fynn settled him a long-suffering look. “Little you know, Captain. Might as well say, ‘so we’re going to drown you now, and if you survive the drowning, we’ll let you live.’”

  While Rhys was pondering that logic, the Espial Gerard opened his eyes and announced, “The node is prepared.” He indicated the garnet circle with one hand. “Please begin.”

  Having been upon many nodes in recent months, Trell was not surprised when he placed one foot upon the vibrant red tiles and the next upon a grassy slope—he hardly even noticed the momentary disorientation—but the view that spread before him certainly came as a surprise.

  He’d emerged upon a high mountainside overlooking a great walled limestone city in the near distance. In the center of the city, two towering jade pillars stood higher than any other structure inside the walls, dwarfing even the glittering gold dome of a central palace.

  Recognizing too well the skyline of that city, Trell spun a look behind him, knowing already what he would find. The Assifiyah mountains reared startlingly close. Their craggy, snowbound peaks were just then shredding a bank of clouds into cotton-like strips. Turning back, Trell saw that the hill ended in a cliff. He knew what lay at the bottom of that chasm, too. Naiadithine and the Cry.

  “It’s very beautiful here,” Alyneri noted as she led Draanil to a halt beside Gendaia. “Have you any idea where we might be?”

  “I have an idea,” Trell muttered tightly. His grey eyes drank in the view, and it tasted strongly of foreboding with a heavy dose of nostalgia stirred in.

  Sakkalaah.

  To think, he might’ve managed a several week journey in a single hour had he known of such things as nodes and Espials for hire, but then he would never have met Carian vran Lea, or Yara, and who knows where he would be now? Trell supposed he still would’ve delivered the Mage’s missive, ensuring a similar inevitable end, but he couldn’t help thinking that the journey truly had been as important as his destination—perhaps more so.

  “Trell…” Alyneri reached out to him with her eyes, with her tone.

  “Not here, Alyneri,” he hissed under his breath. Then he mounted Gendaia and trotted over to join the Espial, who had just come through.

  “Our next node is found in the Guild Hall in the city,” Gerard announced. “Please follow me.” He mounted up and led them away.

  Thirty-Nine

  “How does a man respond to pain? How does it change his will, his drive, his urges, his obedience? These are questions worth pursuing.”

  - The Adept Healer Taliah hal’Jaitar

  Kjieran van Stone stood upon a long balcony of Radov’s palace in Tal’Shira by the Sea searching the horizon for signs of a ship. He dressed as the locals did, wearing a beaded kameez tunic and loose shalwar pants bound at the ankle, both garments sewn from a shimmering silk that migrated from blue to lavender to grey. The color accentuated his dark hair and pale skin and made his colorless eyes seem as diamonds in the sunlight.

  His hands were shaking.

  Kjieran couldn’t stop them shaking anymore. His hands had begun to represent a no-man’s land, that ephemeral boundary between the living and the dead where the doomed souls wandered. His hands demarked a battleground of biological forces which met and clashed and exploded in violent antipathy. They twitched with the Prophet’s chilling, consumptive power, and they shook with elae’s life-giving, fiery warmth. Dore’s Pattern of Changing was working its fell magic upon him, and Kjieran was helpless to stop its progression.

  It had taken days to recover from the initial working, days of fevered torment while his body raged against the malfeasance waged against it. During those days, he surely lingered in this life only because the Prophet’s will bound him there—for the sickness and horrors he endured would’ve driven even the most stalwart to seek the Returning. Now, part of him walked on the other side of death. Though his body outwardly yet seemed human, Kjieran knew it had crossed a threshold.

  As yet, elae remained with him, but he didn’t know how long this would last. This impending loss frightened him the most. Death claimed all men in the end, but to be cut off from elae…even the evils already perpetrated against him paled next to this horrible thought.

  That his mind was still his own, that the Pattern of Changing was so slow to claim him fully…for these graces he thanked Raine’s amulet. The tiny disc lay snug against his chest, and its influence remained strong. The amulet served as Kjieran’s sole source of warmth, for he could no longer feel his own heartbeat, so frail and intermittent was its rhythm. He didn’t hold out hope that the amulet would save him—he knew it merely slowed the inevitable end—but he prayed the amulet would give him enough time to do what he came to do.

  Kjieran’s hands twitched on the balustrade.

  From his vantage, the city of Tal
’Shira spread like the wings of a butterfly to either side of Radov’s palace, which crowned a massive hill at the butterfly’s oblong head. A crenellated limestone wall built upon a rough sandstone base enclosed the entire palace complex. Another great wall surrounding the city itself protected from invading Khurds as much as sandstorms, which were infrequent this far east but still a threat.

  Tal’Shira was a bustling city, a thriving sea port, and the home of sultans and rich merchant princes alike. People went about their business as if the princedom hadn’t been at war for eons, effectively ignoring the ever-growing sea of refugee tents amassing outside the city walls. But this façade of normalcy was but a mass illusion mutually agreed-upon by the city’s elite that they might better perpetuate the lie amongst themselves. In truth, Tal’Shira was the sweet reflection upon a still pond, concealing the slime beneath.

  Everyone blamed Radov for the city’s decline. Kjieran had recently learned that during the course of the last many moons, Radov’s infamous paranoia had crested perilous heights, and now the prince was rumored to be descending into madness. His advisors were cowed, the Congress of Princes was as fractious as a cockfight, and Saldarians ran rampant and unchecked, gleefully marauding in Radov’s own city—not to mention elsewhere in the kingdom.

  Without Radov’s leadership—which while militant had at least been effective—the plug of lawfulness had been yanked from the city, and now Tal’Shira swirled lazily down the drain toward chaos.

  Adding insult to injury, a host of Ascendants—ever the Prophet’s spies—had descended on Tal’Shira. They watched over Radov on their master’s behalf, reporting to Bethamin on the Nadori prince’s every order. They walked freely among the palace, often accompanied by one of the Prophet’s Marquiin, and the people of Tal’Shira shied away in their passing. These Ascendants fashioned themselves as kings. They thrived in the shadow of Radov’s disgusted indifference and meted punishment as readily as commands to all who fell beneath their notice.