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

by McPhail, Melissa

  He settled a steely eye upon the assembled group. When no one raised any objections, the Espial continued, “I will do my best to keep you out of harm’s way.”

  “How close to the lines will we be?” Trell asked.

  “I am not certain. The node lies deep in the mountains far from any settlements.”

  “In the Kutsamak.”

  “Just so.”

  “The Akkadian forces are centered in Raku.”

  “The node is yet several days west of Raku, in my estimation. There is no other way but upon this route, my lord. Do you wish to continue?”

  “Yes, yes,” Fynn waved impatiently at him. “Get on with it, man. If I’m to be forced to endure this heat, I want to be moving eastward at least.”

  “Worried Ghislain is coming after you already, Fynnlar?” Alyneri teased.

  The royal cousin gave her a round-eyed look. “You have no idea the intensity of that woman’s desire for me, your Grace.”

  “Desire to see you drawn and quartered, perhaps,” Rhys muttered.

  Fynn waved airily. “I do not profess to approve of Ghislain’s vast and varied entertainments…only to have participated in many of them.”

  “You are a truly dissolute man, Fynnlar,” Alyneri sighed, smiling at him.

  “One cannot but walk the path before one,” Fynn remarked philosophically. “Isn’t that what you always say, cousin?” and his gaze alighted upon Trell.

  “I don’t think I put it in quite the same context, but yes,” Trell murmured with the ghost of a smile.

  “My lords,” Gerard announced, opening his eyes at last, “The node is prepared. Please proceed as before.”

  And so they did, trading the Guild Hall in Sakkalaah for a vast, arid plain that seemed the barren delta of a once-great river. To the near north, ochre mountains defied the sky to wash the brilliant color from their slopes, while the single wall of a vast escarpment reared several miles to the south.

  Looking across the dry delta toward that high ridge, Trell saw a caravan line of tiny men and camels backlit by the angle of the equally westbound sun. Suddenly he knew exactly where they were. “That’s the Ruby Road,” he said under his breath, feeling ever more ill at ease.

  “Is that bad?” Alyneri asked.

  “No, it’s just—”

  “Come,” announced Gerard, trotting his horse to the front of the group. “This way.”

  He led off eastward, toward a distant point in the delta where the northern mountains seemed to join the southern ridge. Trell had his eye out for a particular peak. Too many coincidences, he was thinking. First Sakkalaah, and now the Ruby Road…

  Yet why should these be coincidences at all? They were traveling eastward to Tal’Shira through the Kutsamak. Logically they ought to cross some part of his earlier path, and yet…

  By late afternoon, they’d traveled deep into the mountains. Trell had taken a different route in his journey toward the Cairs, but he knew they couldn’t be too far from the winding trail that led back to the Mage and his strangely wonderful guests. A part of him wished he and Alyneri might tear away and find again the path to the Mage’s distant sa’reyth, though he remembered too well Balaji’s comment that he hoped Trell need never return there.

  “What is it?” Alyneri asked in the desert tongue just as the horses were rounding a rise and they gained a distant view of the arid mountains ahead of them. “Don’t tell me nothing is wrong. You’ve not been yourself at all today, and you keep searching the sky for I don’t know what.”

  He regarded her pensively, wondering what he could tell her. He’d never had such a strong feeling of unease with no logical reason to account for it. Instinct pushed him to turn them around, to abandon this path and even perhaps the goal of Tal’Shira altogether. Yet Trell couldn’t be certain that his instincts weren’t colored by his own uncertainties and fears, and he refused to succumb to cowardice. After too long with these thoughts turning a circle in his head, he finally answered, “We’re close to the trail I followed from the First Lord’s sa’reyth.”

  Her brows lifted, and she looked around, frowning at the vast mountain range now in view. As far as the eye could see spread the Kutsamak range, its labyrinthine ridges deeply shadowed by the falling sun. “However would you know it?” she murmured in wonder. “Everything looks the same to me.”

  “Because of Jar’iman Point,” he answered, though the truth in her comment brought a smile. The Khurds often said the Kutsamak had been designed by the desert god Ha’viv, who was known for his mocking trickery. It was only that Trell had paid such attention to where the Mage’s trail began and ended that he felt he could ever find it again. “I’ve been looking for the pinnacle they call Jar’iman Point,” he explained, wishing he’d had more time to mend their fragile bond, to ease the jagged distance between them. “You can’t miss it—it’s a sandstone spire that looks like a dagger. The trail to the sa’reyth lies in its shadow.”

  He remembered crossing the node in the early morning on the day he began his journey west and finding himself in the shadow of the mountain as the sun climbed out of the east. “Literally, if you walk toward the Point in its early morning shadow, you can’t but cross the trail.”

  Alyneri looked out over the miles of barren mountains, mottled just then with shadows cast by distant clouds carrying no promise of rain. “Would that we could just break away and go there,” she mused. “You made it sound so wonderful.”

  He gave her a culpable look. “I can’t say I haven’t entertained the notion myself a few times this afternoon.”

  “Especially after the second hour of Fynn’s incessant belching,” Alyneri noted plaintively, switching back to the common tongue. She shot the royal cousin a pained look over her shoulder. “It was like unto a camel attempting to sing.”

  To which said royal cousin belched gratuitously, a long, wavering note somehow reminiscent of a dirge.

  This time he succeeded in drawing the Espial Gerard’s eye, who wrinkled his substantial nose in disgust and turned away again, shaking his head.

  “No one appreciates my many talents,” Fynn complained to Brody.

  “Perhaps if you ever displayed any,” the Bull suggested.

  Fynn gave him an indignant glare. “We criticize what we do not understand.”

  “No one understands you.”

  “My point exactly!”

  To the hum of Fynn’s continued protests, they found their way deeper into the mountains, eventually losing the view, but not before Trell caught sight of what he was sure was the tip of the Point off to the southeast.

  The sun fell low and the air grew chill as night spread across the Kutsamak. They had all donned their cloaks, and Gerard and Trell had begun looking for a place to camp, when Gendaia nickered in the same moment that Trell stiffened in his saddle.

  It took him a moment to recognize what had him on sudden alert, but his desert instincts quickly supplied the answer. He spun to Rhys, who was riding several lengths behind him. “Something’s wrong.”

  The captain heeled his mount forward at once. “What is it, your Highness?”

  Trell looked up at the high ridges surrounding them, his gaze narrowed, waiting… and then he smelled it again. Smoke.

  He cursed himself for not thinking sooner of the need for additional guards. The Kutsamak held a vast array of dangers, bandits being not the least of them. But no Khurd would burn wood in this land—the commodity was scarce, but more importantly, its smell carried too far on the wind. That meant Nadoriin…or worse.

  “Someone’s burning wood,” Trell explained. “I caught just a whiff, so their camp won’t be in this canyon. It’s possible they won’t know we’re here if—”

  Gerard let out a cry and pitched forward over his mount with a black bolt extending from one shoulder. Alyneri screamed.

  Trell felt a bolt whiz by his own ear. He heeled Gendaia forward, snatched the reins from the barely-conscious Gerard and turned them all in a retreat, shouting for
the others. Fynn growled and Rhys barked orders to the men, and they all made a fast exodus back down the ravine.

  The pounding of their own horses’ hooves mingled with yells from behind and above as their aggressors roused in chase. Trell recognized the language their pursuers were shouting with a grim clench of his jaw. Saldarians.

  More bolts whizzed past as Trell saw a narrow ravine rear up on the left and hoped to turn them into it, if only to buy a little time, but the shadows of horses were already coming up from within its depths.

  He swore an oath and urged Gendaia forward instead, but then men and horses were suddenly pouring in from all directions. Trell tossed the Espial’s reins to a startled Alyneri, drew his sword and charged into the advancing line with Rhys close on Gendaia’s flank.

  The clash of battle echoed against the hills as the men of Trell’s party joined in the melee. Ever true, Gendaia seemed always to know when to rear and when to sidestep, dodge or dart, and Trell felled many a man in those early minutes with the help of her skill alone.

  The battle raged fast and desperate, and Trell did his best to keep an eye on his companions, to know who stood and who faltered, to be of aid when possible. But the Saldarians outnumbered them, and Trell had the distinct impression this was only the first wave. When he saw Dorin tumble from his horse and then heard crossbow bolts begin to fly again, he knew it was time to retreat and regroup.

  He yelled as much to Fynn just as Gendaia reared, shattering an attacking Saldarian’s skull with her iron-shod hooves. The man toppled and his horse shied away, giving Trell the opening he needed. He led away through the broken line of Saldarians back toward the little ravine, sadly abandoning Gerard and Dorin that they might save the rest. Turning into the ravine, they galloped between high sandy ridges along a dry creek bed furred with muddied grass.

  The Saldarians didn’t chase them into the ravine. Trell suspected the mercenaries were regrouping, that they thought the ravine would provide no escape, but Trell knew these mountains. East- and west-facing gullies almost always dead-ended, but the north-south ravines, like the one they followed, more often than not led to tributaries that fed into the main channels.

  Yet his hopes for easy escape were crushed when the ravine narrowed to a slot canyon just wide enough for a single horse and rider. Frustrated, Trell spun Gendaia around, thinking fast for other options while Rhys, Cayal and the others reined in looking stormy. The moment his horse slowed, Fynn started listing to the side.

  “Fynn!” Alyneri reached for him even as Brody heeled his mount forward to catch him before he fell.

  “I’m…fine,” Fynn whispered, but he clearly was not. He gingerly opened his cloak to reveal a dark stain spreading across his shirt.

  “Dear Epiphany,” Alyneri breathed. “Is that—?”

  “Shuriken,” Trell pronounced grimly, to which Fynn managed a sickly swallow.

  Three dark spikes protruded from Fynn’s abdomen, just above and below the ribcage. “Belloth take me,” he whispered. “That looks…bad.”

  Trell heard distant hoof-beats and knew they’d little time. He guided his horse over to stop beside Alyneri’s mount, whereupon he leaned to capture her mouth with a sudden rough kiss.

  She drew back in alarm. “Trell, what—?”

  “Alyneri, you have to take Fynn and get to safety. Follow this ravine. If I’m right, it will eventually take you to another canyon.”

  “But can’t we all—”

  “There’s barely room for one horse at a time!” he growled, furious with his own lack of foresight. “We’ll never make it together—their archers can follow along the rim and pluck us off like hens.” Shooting a fierce look at a listing Fynn and blaming himself that it had happened at all, he asked, “Can you heal him?”

  She shook her head as tears brimmed in her dark eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t want to leave you—”

  He took her face in his hands and fastened another kiss upon her mouth, this one lasting and deep. If only they’d had a little more time together…if only he’d been willing to mend the rift that still wounded both of them.

  “Hurry,” he urged Alyneri. “Get Fynn to safety. I’ll join you when I can.”

  “Gods, Trell! Where do I even go?”

  The futility hit him as he gazed into her eyes. Where could she flee to find safe haven in the vast and deadly canyons of the Kutsamak?

  In that moment, he understood.

  It was as if the heavens opened before him and he saw the Mage’s plan from the outset, now finally come full circle. Chills striped his arms even as a sudden sense of peace flooded him. Abruptly Trell swung off Gendaia and grabbed hold of Draanil’s bridle. Looking up at Alyneri, he ordered, “Switch horses.”

  Wordlessly, uncomprehending but not daring to question him, Alyneri climbed from her mount across and onto Gendaia’s back. Trell pulled off his sword and scabbard and shoved it into her hands, drawing an even greater look of alarm.

  “The sa’reyth,” he said then. “Remember everything I told you about it and follow Gendaia’s lead. I will try to meet you there.” Then he looked into Gendaia’s eyes and whispered in the desert tongue, “Get her safely to the Mage, please, Daybreak, for me…because I love her.”

  Gendaia nickered and tossed her head.

  Trell looked to a listing Fynnlar. “Can you ride, Fynn?”

  Wordless and grim, the royal cousin managed a nod.

  “Away then!” He slapped Gendaia’s flank with an urgent command. Then he watched grimly as Alyneri cantered off into the narrow crevasse trailing Fynn close behind.

  For a fleeting moment, Trell felt a desperate sense of loss. Then he pushed off the feeling and sought instead that cold place of singular focus within his consciousness, the place where his own sort of power resided: that determined and steadfast will which had seen him through circumstances even more hopeless than what he now faced.

  He turned resolutely to Rhys. With Brody and Cayal, they made four…against how many? The odds were dismal and the outcome nearly assured, but Trell had seen too many battles to bother with the odds. While there was breath in his body, there was possibility. He swung into Draanil’s saddle. “This is as good a place as any to make our stand, would you agree, Captain?”

  “Yes, Highness,” Rhys replied with a hurricane of a frown. He handed Trell a spare blade.

  And the Saldarians stormed into the ravine.

  They felled the first wave with luck on their side, but eventually Thalma’s eye turned to other pursuits, and Trell and the others floundered in the midst of a mercenary sea. Two dozen hands pulled Trell from Draanil then. The horse reared and fled while Trell struggled to tear free. Then Rhys was charging to his side again, and Brody and Cayal, and suddenly they were all back to back and making a dent in the Saldarian force.

  As the battle escalated, Trell knew only the steady pace of his heart, the dull ache in his arms, the sound of his blade clashing with another’s, and that sense of purpose that ever drove him forward.

  And then, confusingly, he knew fear.

  It settled over him like a noxious cloud, a tainted vapor he inhaled with every labored breath, and the more of it he drew within, the deeper the fear speared into his consciousness. Cayal was the first to fall prey to its malaise, crying out and shying from a blade as like any other. The Saldarians grabbed him.

  Rhys and Brody began to stumble beneath fear’s weight, and that’s when Trell realized a bleak enchantment was at work. “Fight it!” he shouted. “It’s not real!”

  Just speaking the words helped Trell shake off the clinging miasma, but he could not escape the enchantment’s next aggression. It pounced upon him viciously, a shapeless force at once suffocating and unassailable, compelling him down…down…

  He gasped as the working drove him to his knees and simultaneously accosted his mind with twisting, flickering images of gruesome death. Abject emotions flooded him, battering his mind with wretched torments, seeking his own pure thoughts upon which t
o latch and feed.

  He found his face pressed to the earth, his sword being lifted from limp fingers, and still all he could do was gasp for breath while his mind was a battleground of conniving, brutal visions, his head throbbing with the detritus of their wake.

  He saw a pair of boots stop before his blurred eyes, their edges brushed by the hem of a black cloak. A wielder’s cloak.

  “Bind him,” a distant voice ordered.

  To which the wielder standing above Trell remarked humorlessly, “He is bound already. Just get him on a horse.”

  Forty-Three

  “It’s better to have bad luck than none at all.”

  - A saying among the Iluminari

  Kjieran van Stone walked shirtless along the seaward-facing wall of Radov’s palace letting the strong Nadori sun bake his pale skin, desperately wishing he felt its warmth. There, on the palace’s high eastern wall, the ever-present desert wind met and battled the incoming ocean breeze. The clash of forces tossed Kjieran’s shoulder-length dark hair into wild designs even as his hands twitched erratically at his sides.

  Kjieran liked walking the wall. Because of the strong, shifting winds that battered anyone brave enough to explore the winds’ mutual boundary, he rarely encountered a soul beyond the palace guards on regular patrol, their crimson keffiyehs wrapped into turbans, mouths and noses protected by a hanging drape of cloth. They’d watched him suspiciously at first, dark eyes narrowed and piercing, but now they merely nodded slightly as they passed, and their thoughts never whispered of him.

  Kjieran had first taken to walking the wall to escape the constant circumspection of Viernan hal’Jaitar’s spies, who kept their dark eyes close upon him, reporting back to the wielder on every person he came into contact with. As Kjieran had feared, their vigilance greatly hindered his attempts at investigation.