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

by McPhail, Melissa

  Not that such interest in him was ultimately unexpected—had he been given time to think upon it before being dumped on Radov’s doorstep, he might’ve come better prepared to deal with it. A Marquiin, though loathsome, might be tolerated, for few of them retained any grasp of the lifeforce or their truthreader’s talents; but a truthreader with all of his faculties…

  Viernan hal’Jaitar was Sormitáge trained. He knew how easily truthreaders might pluck secrets from unsuspecting minds, and for a court with so many secrets…no wonder Radov refused to share a room with truthreaders of any sort. That Kjieran was unspoiled…this made him immensely dangerous in hal’Jaitar’s view—on top of being a supposed spy. Never mind what else the wielder suspected of him.

  Yet had Kjieran not been forced to walk the wall to find isolation from Viernan’s spies, he might never have stumbled upon the idea that drove him to walk it that afternoon, might never have heard of a man named Yveric.

  He’d first seen him several days ago, on the afternoon of King Gydryn’s arrival. They’d both been enduring the battering winds watching the Sea Eagle make anchor in the bay. Like Kjieran, Yveric seemed glued to the moment, as if fearing a terrible explosion or some other imminent destruction of the ship. Much of Kjieran’s perception of the man was derived from Yveric’s turbulent thoughts—which gleaning was no small feat considering Yveric was a Marquiin and his mind was ever a torrent—but Kjieran had experience sifting through the raving madness in a Marquiin’s skull. He felt reasonably certain of his assessment of the man.

  The next afternoon, Kjieran had again walked the wall, and again he passed Yveric, who stood as a statue draped in billowing grey gauze, staring east. Yveric reminded Kjieran very much of himself back in Tambarré, where he’d so often stood gazing wistfully, longingly, at the jutting peaks of the Iverness range of southeastern Dannym and the hidden Pass of Dharoym, wishing he might one day walk again as a free man through that snow-laden pass, back to serve in the court of his king.

  An idea began to form that day as he watched Yveric. He realized the Marquiin might prove a bountiful source of information if he could manage to gain his confidence. Over the next two days, he followed Yveric in his daily routine, careful to keep out of sight yet staying within mental contact of his mind and the minds of those around him. He learned much.

  Yveric was the first of the Marquiin to have come to Tal’Shira, and the oldest among them. He’d once been a prime questioner for the Prophet, but now his health was failing. That he’d lingered as long as he had was a fair miracle, for the Marquiin were notoriously short-lived. Yveric was Avataren, and there was a rumor that he shared some distant connection to the Fire Princess Ysolde Remalkhen, lifelong Companion to Queen Errodan of Dannym.

  Kjieran became convinced that if ever he was likely to find a kindred spirit in one of the Marquiin, it must be Yveric—and with no time to spare, for King Gydryn’s arrival had pushed up Kjieran’s timetable considerably. He still had no idea how he was going to save his king, or even how to contact him. Gydryn remained sequestered among his knights in a distant wing of the palace where Kjieran was most certainly unwelcome.

  And then there was Dore’s Pattern of Changing, the effects of which were finally starting to show. The night before, Kjieran had awoken to a terrible itching in his feet, the painful tingling radiating up his legs like a swarm of fire-ants feasting on his flesh. He’d scratched desperately in the darkness for hours, finally stumbling out of bed to turn up the lamp. Then, to his horror, did he see the results of his efforts, a sight which sent him staggering to his chamber pot retching.

  He’d pulled off what was left of his toenails the following morning, the yellowish fungus coming loose with a sickening sound, like the sucking of a rock plunked into a stinking bog. Kjieran hadn’t known what to expect from Dore’s working, but looking at the strips of withered flesh still resolutely clinging to his shins, he began to better understand what it was doing to him.

  The skin of his legs had begun to slough away; he was a snake shedding a thick husk to reveal the new scales beneath. What remained was all muscle without flesh, and the muscle had become as stone. His calves were as cold, hard and black as a Merdanti dagger.

  That’s probably the fundamental spell upon which Dore layered further patterns!

  As Kjieran realized this, a violent, hopeless laugh escaped him. He was turning into a Merdanti blade.

  Now he walked the eastern wall on fleshless legs of stone, glad for the dark silk pants that hid what he was becoming, grateful he could still bare his chest to the sun.

  Kjieran saw Yveric from afar and spent the intervening minutes recalling again what he would say to him, how he might convince a man who could very well be insane to help him.

  He passed the usual guard patrol about ten paces before he reached Yveric, the Marquiin’s form standing tall and still beneath his billowing gauze veil. The guards nodded to Kjieran as they passed, their thoughts too quiet for him to overhear. He considered these two soldiers were good men, a rare pair among the ever-growing hordes of rough-and-tumble cutthroats that swarmed Radov’s court.

  Kjieran came to stand a few feet from Yveric and joined him in gazing out to sea. The man turned to assess him, though Kjieran saw nothing of his features beneath the veil, only the motion of his head. He seemed to look Kjieran over and then returned his attention to the panoramic city, the crescent-shaped bay, and the distant sea.

  “What do you see, Marquiin?” Kjieran asked after a moment, his voice just loud enough to be heard over the blustery wind, the whisk of his tossing hair, and the snapping of Yveric’s veil.

  “I see death, Truthreader.” His voice was like dry gravel and echoed with the clipped tones of his mother language. “Is that not what the Prophet teaches awaits us all?” When Kjieran made no reply, Yveric turned to him. Though Kjieran could not see his face, he could make out its strong lines, an aquiline nose and one edge of a squared jaw. “You were his paramour—the one who survived,” Yveric observed brutally. “I heard tales of you.” Looking back to the sea, he hissed with sudden acrimony, “You have a pretty look about you. Is that why he spared you this fate?”

  Despite Yveric’s sharp words, Kjieran felt naught but sympathy for the man. Like all Marquiin, Yveric struggled with each moment to think his own thoughts, to fight the raging inferno of Bethamin’s eternal Fire which ever tormented him, a constant mental storm. Kjieran was becoming his own sort of monster, but at least his mind was still his own—most of the time. “We all have our roads,” he answered, grimacing at the hopelessness he heard in his own voice.

  This response drew the Marquiin’s swift attention. His head snapped around even as he snatched Kjieran’s arm, leaned close and growled under his breath, “Who told you to say that?”

  Kjieran felt the power that was the Marquiin’s particular poison, a gift from their master, shoot out to envelop him, compelling an answer. But this same power also coursed through his own life-pattern now—bound as Kjieran was to the Prophet—and the formless compulsion had no effect.

  “No one,” he answered, marveling at the intensity of the man’s response. He glanced at the Marquiin’s hand on his arm and was surprised to see he wore gloves despite the desert heat. “It merely occurred to me as a truth worth sharing.”

  “Did it?” Yveric dropped his hand and turned away again. The sun was falling behind them now, casting golden rays upon the azure bay and the deep blue sea beyond. “You sought me out,” Yveric said then. “What do you want?”

  “I require your aid.”

  “I am beyond helping anyone, Envoy. You should understand that. Even the Prophet has washed his hands of me.” Abruptly he barked a harsh laugh, acrimonious and bitter. “The irony!” His rumbling laughter continue to brew, growing louder, harder, until its rancor resounded as the breaking of stone upon stone.

  Upon the peak of this crescendo, however, his voice abruptly cracked. He sucked in his breath with an abrasive wheeze, wherein his laughter
devolved into a fit of desperate gasping that lasted several frightening minutes.

  Kjieran stood mute, unable to help him, unable even to conceive of a way to ease his pain, though his concern was evident upon his clean features and in the shock in his colorless gaze.

  When Yveric had finally recovered enough to fill his lungs with shallow breath, he turned his shrouded face to Kjieran. “I am dying…do you see,” and then he added in a raw whisper, “…at long last.”

  They found their way to Yveric’s chambers. The Marquiin had lost his taste for the sea air, he said, but Kjieran suspected it was more due to his having noticed the patrol returning.

  Yveric occupied a single room in the west wing of the palace. A wall of carved screen doors overlooked a small garden. It was a low floor where the wind barely stirred and the sun made a furnace of the stones. Still, it was nice quarters considering what Radov thought of the Marquiin—a token gesture, no doubt, in support of the prince’s alliance with Bethamin. Kjieran was quick to note in comparison, however, that his own quarters were centrally located and overlooked the sea—the better to keep an easy eye on him.

  Yveric staggered past the open screen doors toward a sideboard on the far side of the room. He ripped off his veil and left it to drift down in his wake. Beneath it, he wore a heavy, long-sleeved tunic and thick woolen leggings, both ash grey and well darned. He leaned heavily on the cabinet with one hand while he poured them both wine from a dewy pewter pitcher. He downed his first dose even as Kjieran was approaching and instantly sloshed out another. “Take it,” he gasped, still leaning hard on one hand, his back to Kjieran. He indicated the other pewter goblet with a tilt of his shaved and tattooed head.

  As Kjieran came up slowly beside him and reached for the chilled wine, the Marquiin turned to look at him.

  Kjieran’s hand stilled on the goblet.

  “Yes,” Yveric said brokenly, a humorless smile gracing his thin lips. “It’s something to see, isn’t it?”

  Kjieran forced himself to lift the goblet of wine as he looked upon Yveric’s face. Once colorless, the man’s eyes were now solid black. Worse was the blackened flesh that surrounded them—grim, violet-dark swaths of necrotic tissue that extended their grip like tentacles across his brows and temples, spider-veining along his shaved skull. Once, the man had likely worn the typical Marquiin tattoos around his eyes, but the flesh was now so devoured that none such remained visible. It was the mask of a monster imposed on the face of a man.

  Similar blotches of violet-black flesh webbed his throat beneath his worn woolen tunic, leeches grown to obscene proportion. Kjieran had no doubt that the rest of Yveric’s body looked much the same.

  “They say death comes soon after your eyes go black,” Yveric told him in a gravel wheeze. Then he added acidly, “They know nothing.”

  Kjieran remembered the wine and managed to drink a few swallows without sloshing too much out of the cup, but his hands were twitching like dry branches snapping in a fire. Giving up, he set the mug down and looked back to find the Marquiin’s black eyes considering him intently. It was a ghastly experience.

  “What did he do to you then?”

  Kjieran shook his head, too overcome by the truth to speak of it, even if he dared.

  “So your road is no different from mine…in the end,” Yveric observed gravely. He shook his head, downed his wine and poured a third. “Mayhap he’s right,” he said as some color seemed to return to his gaunt face. “The Prophet, I mean. Perhaps all there is for any of us is death. I certainly crave it.”

  “He made it seem so,” Kjieran said quietly, feeling himself on the edge of a perilous cliff to speak such words aloud. The Prophet had not sought to invade his mind again since that first day, but Kjieran had several times felt his awareness on the other end of the bond and known Bethamin was watching through his eyes. He could tell that the Prophet’s attention was turned away from him in that moment, but there was no way of knowing when it would be coming back—the great eye of Bethamin’s awareness cycling around in the light-tower of his mind to once again fall upon Kjieran’s activities. Nor did he know what other torments might now be possible through the growing strength of their bond. It made Kjieran alert to every moment.

  Yveric staggered over to the doors and stood between them in his woolen clothes, square in the boiling afternoon sun. “I’m cold, Truthreader,” he whispered, listing unsteadily. “I’m always cold.” When Kjieran didn’t answer him, Yveric turned his head and pinned those ghastly eyes on him again. Kjieran could barely look at him, horrified by the idea that he was gazing at his own face in the near future. Yveric barked a humorless laugh. “Ha! I know what you’re thinking—”

  “I seriously doubt that,” Kjieran muttered.

  “Just tell me this,” he said, swaying like a drunkard, “did she come to you too?”

  Kjieran shook his head. “She? Who?”

  “Just tell me if it’s so!” Yveric snapped. “Tell me!”

  Kjieran held up his hands in a placating manner. “Peace, Yveric. I swear to you in Epiphany’s name, no one came to me.”

  The Marquiin grunted. “Then it’s true.” He closed his eyes and swayed like a young pine in a stiff wind.

  Mystified, Kjieran picked up his goblet with both hands and slowly crossed the room toward him. “I’ll tell you what I was thinking,” he said after a moment.

  “What?” asked the man through closed lids.

  “I was thinking you seem impossibly…sane…for a Marquiin.”

  This drew another gravelly laugh from the man. “Among my kind, there is a rumor that the end for the Prophet’s blessed chosen,” and the words came out in a venomous snarl, “comes in one of two ways.” Eyes still closed, he lifted his appalling face to the sun. “Either you go out stark raving mad…or you suddenly turn lucid, that you might know every moment of the horror that awaits you at the end.” He swayed dangerously in place before growling, “Seems I picked the short straw again.”

  “I’m…sorry,” Kjieran said.

  “Ha! You’re one to talk!” Yveric opened his necrotic eyes and looked at Kjieran, leaning close as he observed, “Something gives me the idea your fate will be worse, Envoy.”

  Kjieran swallowed and looked down at the goblet gripped so tightly that his hands were white. Even with all his effort of concentration, still his fingers inadvertently jumped off the goblet. The muscles in his arms and hands twitched beneath his skin as the battle between elae and Bethamin’s fell power continued. He shook his head grimly. “I believe you may be right.”

  Yveric turned in the doorway and leaned his other shoulder against the portal, letting the sun bake his wool-clad backside instead. “So…” he said, looking haggard. “What is it you want from me?” Before Kjieran could answer, he added, “You needn’t fear confession. The Prophet hasn’t haunted my dreams in many moons. He sees my infirmity and loathes me for it.”

  Kjieran blinked at him. “Your dreams? The Prophet treads the path of your dreams?”

  Yveric grunted sourly. “Dore Madden taught our master all manner of torments—I thought you must surely know.”

  Kjieran shook his head, immensely grateful that his dreams, so far at least, had been his own. Yet now that he knew the Prophet cavorted in his subjects’ dreams, he knew such grace wouldn’t last.

  “No matter,” Yveric meanwhile muttered. “You’re safe enough speaking to me. Epiphany be kind, I shall not wake tomorrow.” With this oath, his kissed his gloved thumb and held it to the sky.

  Kjieran drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, ever perceptive to any shift that might alert him the Prophet was listening in. “I seek…” He pressed lips together and trusted to the moment, to this doomed man, and to Epiphany, that she would not forsake him entirely just yet. “I seek the truth behind the deaths of Sebastian and Trell val Lorian of Dannym.”

  Yveric stared at him for a long time with those unsettling eyes. Finally he said, “Then you seek the Shamshir’im.”
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br />   Forty-Four

  “A free mind is infinitely more powerful than a captive one.”

  - The Fourth Vestal Raine D’Lacourte

  Işak’getirmek brushed past the Saldarian mercenary as the latter threw the prisoner down at their campsite. Işak still had the man bound with the fourth, and he lay limply, his eyes unseeing. Işak’s fourth-strand working used the man’s own mind against him, claiming it as an unwilling participant, using his own thoughts to bind him.

  The Saldarian leader, Raliax, joined Işak as the other prisoners were being dropped beside the first, their feet and hands bound with stout rope. Raliax assessed the line, frowning beneath heavy black brows, while Işak in turn assessed him.

  An impatient man, and unforgiving, Raliax had flashing dark eyes and an insincere smile. He delighted in the spilling of blood, during which times he often caught his bottom lip between his teeth in a smile that bespoke of other gruesome amusements. Yet he fashioned himself a nobleman. He kept his jaw clean-shaven, and he wore his black hair in an intricate braided club, as was the fashion among the Nadori nobility—but his nails were dirty and his breath reeked of sour drink, and Işak wasn’t deluded by any part of his charade.

  Among all of this pretense, something in Raliax whispered to Işak…a distant memory that quivered with warning. But its message was gossamer thin and too frail to convey any clear meaning. Still, he had not a breath of trust for the man, and liked him even less.

  Having looked over the assembled prisoners, Raliax demanded of his hirelings, “Where’s the cousin?”

  “Isn’t he one of these?” a man named Joss returned.

  “If he was, I wouldn’t have asked!” Abruptly Raliax hissed a curse and shouted, “Find Fynnlar val Lorian!”

  “I put three darts in ‘im,” said a man Işak knew only as Sharpe. Raliax’s men hailed from Saldaria, but the province’s mountainous borders with Dannym were vague, and Sharpe spoke the Saldarian dialect with a harsh northern accent. “He willn’t get far w’my nails in ‘is belly.”