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

by McPhail, Melissa

  It was to his great relief when he knocked and after an uneasy moment heard Yveric call for entrance. Kjieran opened the door and saw Yveric lying on the floor before the open screens, his body covered in blankets. The sun had not yet fully reached his room, but Yveric clearly lay in wait for it. His back lay to Kjieran, and the Marquiin didn’t turn but said only in a hoarse whisper, “Soon, Truthreader. Soon I am gone.”

  Kjieran came slowly inside and closed the door. “Is there anything I can get you?” he asked. Then he grimaced at the wretched futility of the question.

  Yveric laughed wetly, a whetstone grinding against itself. “What could you get me?” As Kjieran neared, he saw the man’s lips and teeth were stained with blood.

  Sitting down in view of Yveric’s gaze, Kjieran leaned against the wall and hugged knees to his chest. His legs were stone beneath the silk of his pants, like the Prophet’s marble flesh, and inside he felt barren and cold. “I don’t know what you believe, Yveric,” Kjieran observed tonelessly, disheartened by the man’s deteriorating condition. “Would you be offended if I prayed that we should meet again in the Returning?”

  Yveric coughed violently, a spasm that lasted many minutes and brought a surge of blood into the cloth he held to his mouth. When he had recovered but shallow breath, the Marquiin pinned his unsettling ebon eyes on Kjieran. They were alert and lucid and immensely disturbing. “You don’t see it, even still?”

  Kjieran shook his head. “See what?”

  “Once the Fire cuts you off from elae, the line is severed forever. There is no Returning, Truthreader. There is no new life as an Adept.”

  Never had Kjieran imagined such an incomprehensibly vicious end. Always in the back of his mind he’d believed there would be some future life for him…for whatever part of him moved on. But Yveric’s words resonated with too much truth to doubt.

  Kjieran closed his eyes and laid his head back against the wall. He swallowed back a well of bitterness. Would he have chosen this path if he knew it would mean the ultimate sacrifice? If he’d understood then that there would be no Returning, that he would fade into the aether, his spirit unmade?

  “Thought you knew,” Yveric gasped.

  Kjieran opened his eyes to find the man still watching him.

  “Thought you knew the lady,” he whispered, “that day you came…thought she’d sent you.”

  Kjieran shook his head, uncomprehending. “No one sent me, I told you that.”

  “She said you’d be coming, see,” Yveric managed, barely finding the breath around the fluid in his lungs. “Said you’d say…what you said. I didn’t believe…until you came.”

  Kjieran began to feel very unsettled by this talk. “Who is the lady, Yveric?”

  “Has a message for you, too,” the Marquiin whispered, closing his eyes. “Said neither she nor the goddess can reach your dreams…said for you to take off…amulet.”

  Kjieran stared at the man, suddenly dismayed. He spun a fast look around, certain now that this was some devilish trap, a ploy by hal’Jaitar to blackmail or otherwise manipulate him. He resisted the urge to grab the amulet to reassure himself it remained around his neck.

  The Marquiin was staring at him again. “Whatever it is…you wear,” Yveric whispered hoarsely, “they can’t reach your dreams because of it.”

  Neither, apparently, could the Prophet. But how could Yveric know about the amulet? Growing agitated, Kjieran grabbed the Marquiin’s shoulder and demanded, “Who is this lady?”

  Yveric smiled a bitter loathsome grimace full of bloody bone. “…A figment, a delusion, a dream.”

  “A dream.” Kjieran relaxed and released Yveric’s shoulder, but he felt unnerved. How could this man know about the amulet? He was certain he’d never drawn attention to it while in the Marquiin’s company, and to be sure he’d never told a soul of its existence.

  “Kjieran van Stone,” Yveric abruptly spoke his name like a grave calling, his tone suddenly hale and powerful and so unexpected from this shell of a man. Kjieran’s eyes flew to his, startled and shocked. The sun had finally reached the room, and long rays fell now upon the Marquiin’s blighted face. “She says…” he spoke through lungs drowned in blood, forming the words with a desperate force of will, “…there may be a way.”

  Something in the man’s voice, in the flotsam of his tortured thoughts…there was some whisper among the madness that spoke of truth. “A way to what?” he urged, grabbing the Marquiin’s arm.

  “I’m cold, Truthreader,” Yveric whispered.

  Then he died.

  Kjieran took his time getting back to his rooms. He was disheartened over Yveric’s death and seething at the callousness of the Ascendants, who had refused to do more than cart the man’s body out to be dumped at sea. Kjieran had said the Rites for the Departed over Yveric before he called the Ascendants to attend to him, but even this did not bring consolation.

  In truth, Kjieran feared Yveric’s end on many levels. A part of him wished there might be another there to likewise witness his own death…to walk with him to the Extian doors, if not beyond. But more, if what the man said was correct—and Kjieran had to believe it was, for elae had resonated with its truth—then Yveric was gone for eternity. There would be no Returning for him, no new life. He was forever severed from elae.

  This truth was so disturbing that for the first time, Kjieran honestly desired death. Were he to somehow find his way across that threshold now—before Dore’s pattern finished its work, before the Prophet’s bond became a granite sarcophagus for his soul—if he might perish precipitously, he retained a chance of rebirth. Yet the very idea seemed so hopeless, so beyond possibility…

  It was in that moment that he saw his king.

  Kjieran had just entered the arcade bordering the pink marble Court of Penitence and its rising jade Temple of Jai’Gar beyond. There, before the Pool of Purification, surrounded by a score of knights, stood Gydryn val Lorian. The Dannish contingent shared the poolside with a host of others, for despite its off-putting name, the Court of Penitence was a popular locale for pretentiously pious ladies as well as the dark-eyed courtiers who preyed upon them.

  The king had stopped to view the temple—Kjieran glimpsed him between his red-coated personal guard—and he remained a striking presence. Gydryn soon set off again, the dark-coated eye in a hurricane of red, so close and yet completely unreachable by any means Kjieran could envision.

  The moment was heartbreaking.

  However am I going to manage this? He could no more bring himself to raise his hand against Gydryn val Lorian than he could against himself, and yet if he did not do something soon, he feared the Prophet would compel him into the act and all would be lost.

  As Kjieran stood immobilized struggling with these uncertainties, he saw a shadowed form detach itself from a column across the way and move in the opposite direction. Kjieran caught just a sliver of the man’s thoughts, but it was mirror clear.

  Trell val Lorian.

  Kjieran called upon his pattern of shadows, draped it about himself like a cloak, and followed.

  It was not so easy to hold the pattern that time. Elae felt like sand between his fingers, and he kept having to breathe deeply of it that he might maintain a reservoir to fuel the working. He knew what was happening, that Dore’s pattern was slowly overtaking elae, steadily gaining ground, each foothold upon his person stronger than the last. He faced this truth with grim resignation; it was an eventuality as inevitable as nightfall, as the inexorable motion of the tides.

  There may be a way…

  The Marquiin’s admonition haunted him, a tormenting mystery. Who was this lady that came to madmen in their dreams prophesying salvation? Or if the dream was but a dream, how had Yveric known of the amulet? Kjieran was incredibly disturbed by their final conversation, for Yveric had been lucid in his last days, and his words rang with truth.

  Yet Kjieran dared not chance removing his amulet; it was his last lifeline to elae.

  The man
Kjieran followed was singularly focused, and Kjieran followed him deep into the guts of the palace, down and through narrow, stone-lined corridors where servants scurried and mercenaries and others drank and pissed and gambled. Past storerooms and cellars, he followed the stranger into a twisting service tunnel that eventually emptied into the lower city.

  When Kjieran realized they were no longer in the palace, he began to wonder just where the man was going that he was so focused on Trell and yet so far from hal’Jaitar’s domain. Wondered, that is, until he saw a great building rearing at the end of an alley and realized with a sinking unease that all of Tal’Shira was hal’Jaitar’s domain.

  It was the building he’d come staggering out of several nights past, and beneath it, in a secret subterranean cavern—the Assassin’s Guild.

  The alley dead-ended in an ironbound door, which Kjieran’s spy quickly opened with a trace-seal to slip within. All around Kjieran, high stone walls blocked the daylight, with no retreat but the long alley down which he’d just come. A high balcony of wrought-iron stood three floors above, but it was far out of reach with no trailing ladder.

  Kjieran looked around anxiously, knowing something was amiss, but his senses were not so acute as once they’d been.

  Once, he might’ve crafted a second pattern to reveal the currents, that he might see what else was being worked in his presence, but it was all he could do to hold a single pattern in place now.

  Still, he was a truthreader, and all such Adepts had instilled within them a keen sense of the truth of things. Kjieran knew there was a falsehood in that alley—something beyond the pattern he worked. There was but one way to find out what it was.

  He released his pattern.

  No sooner had he appeared in the middle of the alley than seven other shapes materialized as well—big men, most of them, with one garbed in wielder’s black. The latter had been hiding the brutes with much the same pattern Kjieran worked, hiding their thoughts as well as their forms, that Kjieran might sense nothing of them.

  “Recognize this place, Truthreader?” asked the wielder with a sneer. He wore a black keffiyeh banded with a gold agal, and his rounded nose and slightly upturned eyes marked him as Bemothi, in keeping with his accent. “Seen it recently, perhaps?”

  There was no point in dissembling. They had lured him there with thoughts of Trell. They knew what purpose he was about. Kjieran looked around, but he did not see hal’Jaitar. “I would speak to your master,” he told the wielder, loathing his own foolishness, wondering how he was going to avoid this disaster.

  “Oh, but my master takes ill interest in northern spies. Unless…he might hear a confession.”

  Kjieran looked around at the six men looming near. They were all heavily armed, but a single one of them seemed capable of breaking his neck like a twig. “To what end?”

  “Perhaps to learn why you’ve really come to M’Nador, Kjieran van Stone,” the wielder replied. “Who do you work for? Why do you seek news of Trell val Lorian?”

  “I serve the Prophet,” Kjieran said numbly.

  The wielder laughed. “Yes, and who else?” His eyes flashed with this question, no doubt one hal’Jaitar shared. “How many masters have their hooks in your tongue?” When Kjieran gave no answer, the wielder smiled. “So there is another. My master thought as much.”

  The man approached, eyeing Kjieran speculatively with his slanted almond eyes. He appeared to be in his third decade, but Kjieran suspected he was far older, for he’d gained his first four Sormitáge rings, and no man became a wielder who did not work the Pattern of Life, for mastery of the craft was more than one lifetime in the gaining. Kjieran knew then that even had he full use of elae and all of his faculties about him, he still would’ve been outmatched by this man.

  “My master perceives all manner of patterns upon you, truthreader,” the wielder said as he walked a slow circle around Kjieran, his hands lost within the folds of his ebon robe. “He would know how you defeated his poison and what power you worked in the Hall. Confess these things…confess what mischief you are truly about, and he might be convinced to spare your life.”

  Kjieran broke into a humorless smile, hollow and full of grief. “If I thought your master capable of that, I might even be tempted.”

  The wielder settled him a grim smile. “It seems then we have come to the end of our meeting, Kjieran van Stone.”

  He nodded to his men, and descended upon Kjieran as one. Strong fists pummeled him, as did knees and elbows, feet and bludgeons. Kjieran wallowed in the dirt helplessly, and still they kicked and beat him. Even with half of him already changed, the pain was unimaginable.

  He made no attempt to defend himself.

  He wasn’t sure what part of him yet lived to experience such agony. Yet in some small way, pain’s fiery warmth was a welcome relief from the frozen void that was the Prophet’s bond. Kjieran knew he might at any time seek the Prophet through this link, might know—as he had known in the Hall—how to wield his grave power and escape. But he did not reach for Bethamin. In fact, he tried with everything he was to keep the Prophet from sensing what was being done to destroy his precious weapon.

  A great part of Kjieran desperately craved the idea that this could be his end, and with the thought, all other considerations waned. Any thought of his king, of his mission—anything and everything he cared for vanished in light of his suddenly overwhelming yearning for death. He sought it so completely that even his own honor fled from the ferocious face of this rearing desire. So he let them do their worst, praying all the while that they would be successful.

  Eventually the pummeling ceased and he was yanked up to hang limply between two of the men. The world swam; pain consumed every part of his being while his legs felt numb and cold and rock-heavy. He hung his head, seeking oblivion.

  “Do it,” growled the wielder.

  Something cold and sharp speared inside him. He felt the blade slicing through the flesh of his stomach, as yet unchanged by Dore’s violent working, felt his insides opened to the alley’s foul air. He heard himself scream.

  They dropped him in the dirt. Kjieran lay limp, staring dully at the dry earth. The wielder came to stand over him. “My master gives his regards, Truthreader.”

  Two fast but heavy clicks, and Kjieran’s body twitched violently as the crossbow bolts found their way into his heart. Someone reached down and grabbed his head, twisting it roughly that his eyes might stare upward, that he might focus upon the black-robed figure standing on the high balcony. Hal’Jaitar.

  Then they left him.

  Kjieran lay for a long time in silent despair, so numb with hopelessness he couldn’t find the will to think, to move—certainly not the will to continue life as he was living it now. As the hours passed with the failing day, his mind drifted and awareness slipped toward unconsciousness. Pain and exhaustion mingled, leaving him disoriented, confused. He was so inconsolably alone.

  Kjieran never knew why he called for the Prophet. Perhaps in his agonized condition, in the confusion of waiting for a death that had disavowed him, he sought companionship during the hours that should’ve been his last…so he sought the only living soul his agonized mind could reach.

  My lord…

  In moments, the Prophet’s awareness opened to him.

  Kjieran…Kjieran what has happened?

  Kjieran had barely recalled the brutal memory for the Prophet’s inspection before he was drawn within his consciousness. The world took a different shape, and Bethamin was suddenly kneeling at his side. His hands—strangely warm—lifted Kjieran’s shoulders, and the Prophet cradled Kjieran’s head in his lap.

  “I do not understand,” Bethamin said, his dark eyes uncommonly vivid, his tone sharp. “What has happened?”

  Kjieran tried to focus, but it was so hard when confusion clung to every thought. A jumble of images bounced across the bond. He saw the Prophet react, saw his gaze tighten, his dark eyes turn ever colder. “WHO DARES ATTEMPT HARM YOU!”

>   Kjieran felt the blast of Bethamin’s righteous anger shuddering through him, a thunderous rage that shook marble dust from the massive stones of his mental chamber. “Hal’Jaitar,” Kjieran whispered.

  There was no reason he should feel weak, he knew, for they communed now out of time, wholly in the Prophet’s mind. But some residual awareness of his body made it hard for him to find strength or will, his very real disorientation causing a lack of mental clarity and focus.

  The Prophet pushed a strand of raven hair from Kjieran’s forehead. It seemed impossible, but Kjieran thought he sensed concern in the man’s manner, in the reverberation of his thoughts—something more than mere indignation. Could it be that the Prophet actually cared about him? Kjieran had thought such emotion entirely beyond his ken.

  The Prophet’s hold upon him was strong, the bond growing, thickening like the stalk of some noxious weed. Kjieran knew before Bethamin asked what his next question would be. “Why did you not call upon me for aid?” His tone was dangerous and dark, full of injury and accusation.

  Kjieran held the Prophet’s gaze feeling wretched and distraught. He braved only the truth. “To my great shame, my lord, I sought to know what would happen…to know if my body could still be injured. I regret that my human soul is so frail, my will so weak…I regret that I sought to know such things.”

  The Prophet trailed his fingers down Kjieran’s face, pressed his thumb hard upon his chin to part his lips. Anger rolled off him in waves, the storm of his thoughts amassing chill clouds of power. “This Viernan hal’Jaitar, Radov’s wielder,” he said in a low voice, his dark eyes veritably exploding with fury, “I will make him suffer for this.”

  Kjieran closed his eyes and let the Prophet’s anger wash over him. Somehow it felt…cleansing. The part of him that was still himself shuddered in this knowledge, for he saw that he was changing, becoming…but in that moment of heartbroken misery, he could not prevent it—did not even want to. In that moment, Bethamin owned him wholly.