“Just get the men out of here, Joss!”
Perhaps it was the desperation in Işak’s tone that finally got through to the man, but Joss’s face went slack, and he rushed off shouting orders at high pitch.
Işak looked back to the west. He had a vast repertoire of patterns that Dore had made him learn through threat and torture and pain. Sometimes the patterns themselves had been as painful to learn or work as the punishment being held over him. But outside of the fifth, which Işak could not work, only one pattern was truly effective against a Sundragon, according to Dore, and even then it was only effective once, for afterwards the creature would be alert to it.
Işak made ready with this pattern while his men regained their horses and lined up to cross the node. They moved single-file, vanishing with a step, the prisoners bound and hooded now to prevent future mishaps.
Işak brought up the rear of the line, backing toward the node, acutely aware of the risk he was taking. And yet, if he failed and the dragon claimed him as he’d surely claimed Sharpe, who could say if such a death might not be preferable to an eternity bound to Dore Madden? Işak pondered this in ill humor while the line of escape seemed to shrink at an alarmingly slow rate.
Only half the men had crossed when the resonance of Işak’s first-strand pattern grew so painful that he had to release it, knowing the dragon came too near. He kept his eyes pinned on the western hills, sparing only a glance here and there for the agonizingly long line still between him and the node.
Then he saw him.
A man approached from out of the shadows. Walking tall and powerfully built, he wore a greatsword behind one shoulder, its black stone hilt carved in the likeness of a winged dragon. His long raven hair was pulled back from a wide widow’s peak, and his gaze was just as fiery in human form as it had been whilst flying the skies.
Here then was the fearsome Şrivas’rhakárakek in the flesh! Dore would’ve pissed himself.
His heart racing, Işak released his pattern.
***
Rhakar saw the Saldarians and their prisoners vanishing one by one, obviously crossing a node. But he let them go, for the man he wanted followed at the end.
This one Rhakar would not harm—unless he must—for now that he’d fixed his attention newly and firmly upon the young wielder, Rhakar saw that he was surely a Player.
Oh…men rarely knew they played in the First Lord’s game, but Rhakar could always tell. An aura surrounded such men or women. They had an almost indefinable quality to their life patterns that made each one ring with a certain faint chime, a harmonic of the greater chord resonated by the vast pattern that was the First Lord’s game itself.
It changed a man, being part of the First Lord’s game. Whether he knew it or not, his pattern was inalterably transformed.
Rhakar fixed his gaze upon the wielder and strode toward him purposefully. He knew the man held elae, but clearly he could not work the fifth, so Rhakar spared no inspection for the fourth-strand pattern he held in his mind.
When the wielder released it, Rhakar easily batted it away with a mental sweep, and yet—
Impossible!
A mental cage sizzled into being, powerful bindings spider-webbing in lightning streaks to ensnare his thoughts.
Rhakar staggered beneath the onslaught and fell to one knee, shaking his head as his vision clouded with spiraling pathways. He knew this pattern. It was old…he’d not seen it used in centuries.
The pattern was a trap, of course, a maze that could only be escaped by mentally tracing its endless curves and alleys. Yet to do so itself was deadly, for the more mental energy one put into the maze, the stronger the maze became. The maze likewise required increasing attention—greedily, thirstily, it was an insatiable beast that demanded a man pour in ever more of himself until his mind was entirely devoured within it.
Rhakar regarded the wielder blurring beyond his vision with a new appreciation. How ingenious he’d been. Beneath the puny pattern he’d thrown at Rhakar had lurked one with real bite. A wielder without the fifth might not harm a creature of Rhakar’s ilk—no—but he could occupy the dragon’s mind with fourth-strand trickery that was just as incapacitating. Which is exactly what this wielder had done.
Rhakar pushed a hand to the earth to steady himself as he pitched forward yet again. The labyrinth was urging his attention, and it was a hellish battle to deny its will. He looked up and forced himself to focus on the wielder standing ten paces away from him.
The man was staring back.
Rhakar wondered how such a youngling as this had found the pattern of the Labyrinth. To his knowledge, there were few living wielders who recalled it. The man’s hand was well-played though; Rhakar never would’ve imagined him harboring knowledge of such a vicious pattern.
“I’m…sorry,” the wielder said, his voice low and strangely tormented.
Rhakar wondered how gruesome his own expression must’ve been to have elicited such an apology. He knew the man meant it, though, even as he could tell the wielder was himself surprised that he’d offered it.
Then the Labyrinth had him. Rhakar collapsed onto his side, unable to respond lest he lose what tentative hold he had left on his own mind. He watched through a blurred haze as the wielder turned and crossed the node, leaving him alone in the darkening valley.
Twilight had just fallen when Rhakar escaped the Labyrinth, at last breaking the pattern into shards. The maze exploded into bits, its outline reduced to incomprehensible symbols erupting in every direction. Elae bled out of them and they dissolved, their meaning lost without ever being understood.
It was never a question that Rhakar would escape the maze. He’d many times fought the Labyrinth—as youths, he and his sister Mithaya had used it relentlessly on each other—but the stronger one’s mind became, the more compelling the maze. Rhakar was pleased that he’d broken it as quickly as he had.
Never mind that Balaji would’ve claimed he should’ve done it in half that time and Ramu would’ve arched a brow and asked why he’d allowed the maze to capture him in the first place. Rhakar thought his two oldest brothers were often impossible in their imperiousness, but he vowed neither of them were as insufferable as the First Lord’s zanthyr.
Shaking off the last vestiges of the pattern, Rhakar sprang to his feet. He walked to where the young wielder last stood and stared down at the stark line where myriad boot prints ended abruptly in the night-pale earth.
There had been a popular rumor passed among the wielders of the Fourth Age, those who’d last walked in the Citadel halls and tested for their rings before the Hundred Mages…the last generation known to have worked the Labyrinth. As he gazed upon the trampled earth, Rhakar wondered if the young wielder had been instructed by such a one.
There were a few survivors from the Citadel living outside of T’khendar. While Rhakar would not have allowed such as them to share the air in the same valley lest they sully it, his young wielder had worn scars that hinted at a mentor from the Fourth Age.
If the young man had mentored with such filth as Viernan hal’Jaitar or Dore Madden, however, he was sure to have been taught the same falsehoods.
Rhakar smiled.
Then he summoned the second strand and crossed the node.
Forty-Nine
“Therein lies the challenge of the game—that men are free to choose. That you cannot always predict what a man will do.”
- Dhábu’balaji’şridanaí,
He Who Walks The Edge of The World
Kjieran lay in the surf of dawn’s high tide. Powerful waves thundered down across his naked body, washing him repeatedly in scouring sand. While he lay at the edge of the Fire Sea, the sky had brightened from dusk to powder blue, clouds fading from rose-gold into downy white. The flesh of his hands was pruned, his shoulder-length dark hair a ragged, tangled mess of weeds and sand, but the crashing waves had scourged the necrotic flesh from his legs and hips, and now his lower body shone blackly each time the waves dissipate
d.
Kjieran gazed down at it in morbid fascination. Without the obscuring tissue, the ropy muscles of his thighs bulged grotesquely. What was he made of now that this stony flesh, dark as onyx, flexed and extended though no life ran through his veins? Had such monsters as he was becoming ever existed in legend, perhaps in the Age of Fable, when Warlocks from the Shadow Realms regularly made love to the dual-headed sorceresses of Vest? Looking at his legs and hips, now completely transformed, Kjieran could imagine himself a fortnight hence, once the rest of his body had succumbed to Dore’s Pattern of Changing. The vision made him shudder.
Deeming himself finally well-scrubbed, Kjieran stood and dove into the surf. He swam out past the rocks to let the deep water cleanse the sand from his hair and ears and cleanse his spirit of the gruesome foreboding that so often held him in thrall these days. His legs were heavy in the water, and he couldn’t float as once he’d done. But he didn’t tire of swimming, no matter how strong the current, and the enveloping water was a comfort to his battered soul.
Kjieran often thought of the Prophet now. The more his body succumbed to Dore’s pattern, the stronger he felt Bethamin’s bond clutching him. A perpetual awareness of the Prophet was growing within him, and though the man had so far honored his promise not to invade Kjieran’s thoughts, still Kjieran was constantly aware of him in subtle ways. Every day Kjieran grew to better understand the Prophet’s mind—how he thought, if not why—and every day Kjieran became more certain that there could be no escape from him.
As he swam in the cold sea, Kjieran marveled that he clung yet to life at all. If the Prophet’s theories were true, he should long ago have embraced death. Yet something within him drove him to survive, some strength of will that demanded he endure.
Purpose held him—the driving need to solve the mystery of Sebastian’s death and Trell’s disappearance, the resolute conviction that he must save his king. This purpose, this promise…these ideas chained Kjieran to life more surely than the Prophet’s binding ever could.
Finding himself far from shore, Kjieran dove beneath the waves and turned onto his back, letting his raven hair float freely around his face as he sank ever deeper. Looking up at the sparkling surface, he felt himself drifting slowly downwards until his feet struck the sandy bottom and the sun shone as a diffuse flame wavering far above. It felt strange to anchor in the sea floor and need no breath, hear no heartbeat, feel no painful burning in his chest nor any pressure in his ears. He might’ve stayed there forever with naught but the sound of the whispering sands for company, letting the tiny sea creatures make their homes in his hair, crustaceans attaching to his stone body—or at least until the Prophet claimed his will and drew him forth…until there was no other end but the death of his soul among Bethamin’s devouring lust.
Yet he could not bring himself to give in yet to death.
Always within him sparked the tiniest fear of leaving this life—even the horrific life left to him. Certainly the ability to embrace death would’ve come as a relief, and yet the contemplation of death was in itself more intensely terrifying than any pain he had yet endured.
One would think this proved that a man strove for survival, not death, as his ultimate end. Yet Kjieran knew, because he knew him now, that the Prophet would never see it that way.
The sun shone high by the time he walked out of the sea.
Looking down at his onyx legs, he felt half sea-creature himself, some Wildling spawned in the darkling deep. His tunic and pants lay where he’d left them, warming on a rock. He’d taken to wearing the Nadori shalwar-kameez for their ease of movement as much as for the way the loose silk hid what he was becoming.
He faced a long walk back to the palace from his secluded beach, which was gained by way of a treacherous path no sane man would attempt. Time enough to decide upon his next course of action.
Since his foray into the Assassin’s Guild, Kjieran had barely dared venture forth into the palace. He’d stayed far from the Court of Fifty-Two Arches—which was now watched day and night by hal’Jaitar’s spies—and had spent much time in his rooms scratching and twitching and being generally miserable, worrying over Trell’s state and what would become of him once he fell into hal’Jaitar’s hands.
His inability to reach his king with any sort of warning greatly distressed him, and his visits to the Prophet’s mind were growing ever more unbearable. He’d received no notice from hal’Jaitar detailing when or where he was expected to perform the assassination of his king, and he wondered if he actually ever would get such a missive. More likely the man was preparing his forces to descend upon Kjieran at the first sign of aggression.
It bothered him most that he’d heard nothing from hal’Jaitar in any capacity—especially after the scene in the Hall. The wielder remained suspiciously silent, and his usual spies had been recalled from watching Kjieran. There was a chance, of course, that hal’Jaitar was still occupied searching for the man who’d infiltrated his sacred sanctum, that he didn’t know it had been Kjieran and had his forces deployed to this end. But somehow Kjieran didn’t think so. He feared that hal’Jaitar suspected him, that he was only lying in wait, the viper coiled for its retaliatory strike.
Kjieran’s hands twitched as he walked.
It was a stony path he followed along the arid cliffs north of the palace, and all the while he traveled, his right hand clutched his amulet, safe beneath his tunic. It was his only comfort, his last tie to a humanity that had abandoned him. He hardly noticed he was holding onto it until once he saw his shadow. After that, he forced his hands to his sides and kept them there lest he draw undue attention to the talisman.
He saw the Ascendant while still on the road leading down to the palace’s north gate. He couldn’t be sure if he could see so clearly due to a new sharpness of sight or merely because the man stood in the sun with the strong daylight glaring off his torc and wrist cuffs as brightly as across his shaved pate.
By the time Kjieran could make out the spiraling tattoo on the Ascendant’s forehead, the man had descended from the perch he’d been sharing with one of the pair of limestone lions gracing either side of the palace gates and was standing squarely in the middle of the road, forcing all others entering or exiting to veer around him and earning black looks from the palace guards.
Guessing that the Ascendant had been waiting for him but not the reason why, Kjieran took the man by the arm and pulled him from the road. The maneuver narrowly avoided their imminent collision with a wagon laden with carpets upon which sat four black-eyed Nadoriin in crimson-chequered keffiyehs. None of the men had seemed the least bit squeamish about running them down.
Standing at the side of the road, the Ascendant glared at Kjieran as if affronted by his attempt to save him from injury. “I’ve stood here for hours looking for you!” the man groused. He was hairy as a bear and slightly paunched, with a fold of tanned fat hanging over the heavy gold chain that secured his shendyt, that tri-folded kilt of linen that all Ascendants wore. His forehead shone with the spiraling tattoo of the aggreitha, the researchers and scholars who acted as the Prophet’s scribes.
“How did you know I would be coming this way, Ascendant?” Kjieran inquired uneasily. He clasped his twitching hands behind his back.
“Didn’t. The Brother Noll’s been watching for you at the South Gate, too. At least he’s standing in the shade.” Settling Kjieran a suspicious glare, he demanded then, “What business for the Prophet possibly drew you north, Envoy? There’s nothing but rock and sea for miles.”
“When last I checked my business was not also yours, Ascendant. What is it you want?”
The man glared daggers at him. Ascendants were ill used to being challenged—the best of them were naught but low-breed peasants whose innate hatred of authority led to its inexcusable abuse as soon as they were given any. These were men who chose to embrace Bethamin’s doctrine, and Kjieran had yet to meet a one with some redeeming quality. “Marquiin Yveric sent us in search of you,” the Asc
endant grumbled by way of particular complaint. “That was ere dawn, and it’s been hours since. I expect he may be dead by now—Lo but the Prophet sayeth it so!”
Kjieran’s hands twitched behind his back, this time with a violent desire to choke the insolent man, but he replied only, “Take me to him at once.”
The Ascendant gave him a doleful look and remarked under his breath, “Tis a fool to order twice what a man’s already been sent to do.” He turned and stalked back through the palace gates.
Kjieran followed, feeling turbulent and fractious now. Yveric’s possible deterioration concerned him as much as the constant fear of hal’Jaitar’s spies. He remained ever conscious of the thoughts of others, too, knowing that happenstance alone might put him near someone who had information of Trell’s whereabouts.
But even with so many swirling concerns clamoring for attention, Kjieran’s concentration was repeatedly interrupted by the brand on the Ascendant’s back.
They all had them, and Kjieran had seen its like many times. It was a twisting, thorny pattern as like unto darkness as billowing curls of smoke or the plunge of Black Krinling oil into clear water, a malevolent yet meaningless pattern—at least in its lack of ability to harness elae.
Yet looking at it now through eyes seasoned by a bond to the pattern’s maker, Kjieran saw something new in its construction. Far from meaningless, the pattern encapsulated what seemed the Prophet’s entire doctrine. Within its swirls were tomes of knowledge, yet the truth it concealed—or revealed to those who understood its language—was so antipathetic to elae that Kjieran’s Adept mind had been incapable of recognizing even a shadow of its existence until now.
Suddenly the darkness of the pattern chilled him, and he forced his eyes to look away and not return to it.
Kjieran was humming with agitation by the time they reached Yveric’s room. He felt an unexpected kinship with the Marquiin, and though he’d known the man was near death’s door the last time they spoke, he didn’t want him to pass into the beyond without saying goodbye.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 71