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

by McPhail, Melissa

  The other Saldarian, a giant cornstalk of a man named Vincent, clicked the dice in his hand and watched Işak with blatant mistrust.

  “Which cell is the Lord Captain’s?” Işak asked him.

  Vincent thumbed over his shoulder. “Fourth one down.”

  “Open it.”

  The Saldarian plucked a ring of keys from a hook on the wall and ambled down the barrel-vaulted hallway, ducking to the side each time he passed a hanging lamp, lest the iron bang against his too-tall head. Stopping before the fourth arched door, he unlocked and then hauled it open with a squawking protest of hinges.

  “Leave us,” Işak ordered as he moved inside.

  The man shrugged and left.

  Işak pulled the door to and then waited with hand and ear to the wood—as well as a flow of the first—listening carefully until he was certain Vincent had retreated.

  Then he turned to face the captain.

  Rhys val Kinkaide sat in the corner with one bandaged leg extended, the other knee bent, and an arm draped over the latter. His wrists and ankles were shackled, and heavy links trailed back to the wall. The beatings he’d endured had not exactly softened his demeanor; if anything, he looked more dangerous in the chains of captivity than he had when bound in rope alone. He watched Işak coldly.

  “Lord Captain Rhys val Kincaide,” Işak said, moving further into the dim room, which held the musty odor of potatoes in its earthen walls. One hand worked his ever-present string into elaborate knots, a chain of lost memories. “I have questions for you, Captain.”

  When the captain said nothing, merely stared at him disdainfully, Işak posed, “Your Prince Ean…what kind of man is he?”

  The captain glared daggers at him.

  Exhaling a sigh, Işak leaned one shoulder against the wall. “Captain, you know I can compel any knowledge out of you which I require, and might I remind, my patterns are not nearly as pleasant as those of a truthreader.”

  Rhys still looked belligerent, but after a moment he answered, “He is a better man than you have hope of ever becoming.”

  “Ah, indeed, that is undoubtedly true, for I claim no such lofty aspirations.” Işak pushed off the wall and began to pace the short length of the cell with knotted string clasped behind him. “Will he come for you? I think that is the answer I am most interested in having.” He turned his gaze on the captain, feeling uncommonly secure behind his new mask. Odd that velvet cloth could prove more sturdy protection than shield or buckler or mail, yet what Işak hoped to safeguard was nothing that metal might defend.

  Rhys watched him in his solitary pacing. “He will come,” he reluctantly answered, but there was warning in his tone, and anger aplenty in his gaze.

  “And what do you know of his talent with the art?”

  “Nothing I understand.”

  Işak gave him a curious look. “Who trained him as a wielder?”

  Rhys shrugged. “The zanthyr a bit. But that was after his Highness did… whatever he did to that Marquiin.”

  “Ah yes, the fateful deed,” Işak murmured. “What can you tell me of it?”

  “I’ve just told you all I know,” the captain growled.

  Oddly, Işak believed him. Rhys val Kincaide struck him as a simple soldier, steady and forthright in his loyalties. Not one to attempt to deceive—though he’d no doubt the man would happily wring his neck if given the opportunity.

  “What’s with the mask?” Rhys bearded upper lip lifted in a sneer. “Little too hot in that hood suddenly? Afraid to let the light find your face for what it might reveal?”

  Işak cast him a bland eye. “How little you know of me, Captain.”

  “I know a man who’s hiding when I see one.” He shifted in his corner and winced as he adjusted his injured leg. “I hear that dragon’s still out there waiting,” he commented then. “He must’ve liked the taste of that Sharpe fellow. I vow the more deserving of death, the tastier they are. No doubt he’s salivating over you something fierce.”

  “But we’re speaking of Ean today, Captain,” Işak reminded him with a humorless smile. His temper rose beneath the man’s taunts. Something in the captain ground against his deepest aggressions, as like toward an overbearing father too quick to punish and oft unjustified. “How fares your youngest prince with a blade?”

  The captain barked a laugh. “As if you’ll meet him fairly in battle.” He spat at Işak’s feet. “He’ll take you left-handed.”

  “I welcome the challenge,” Işak replied, his gaze growing colder still.

  Rhys laughed loudly that time. “Aye, so will he. In that you’re well paired.”

  Işak was fast wearying of the haughty captain, though it bothered him doubly that the man so easily frayed his temper. Worse, he suspected that the captain knew his questions about Ean were but a pretence. Indeed, the purpose for which he’d sought out Rhys was intimately connected to the reason he wore the mask to do it, and Işak’s head was already pounding in anticipation of this discourse, making conversation increasingly difficult.

  Recognizing his own growing liability, Işak asked, “How long have you served Gydryn val Lorian?”

  “All my life,” Rhys answered with a look of proud defiance.

  Işak affected his most benign tone as he posed, “I am interested in the story of your Prince Sebastian.” He turned to pace in the other direction, hands clasped behind him, his left hand unweaving the knots that now entirely bound the string. “What really happened to your king’s firstborn son?”

  Rhys gave him a long look, his gaze taking in Işak’s string and its knots with suspicion. “He was murdered. It’s no secret.”

  “The whole story, Captain, if you please.”

  Rhys frowned. “It was eight—maybe nine years ago now,” he answered while his pale blue eyes watched Işak. “His Highness Prince Sebastian went as his father’s emissary to a parley in M’Nador, supposedly called by the Akkadian Emir—”

  Işak’s head exploded yet again upon this statement, achieving new levels of torment. He pushed a hand to the wall and barely gasped out, “Yes—yes, and…?”

  The captain’s gaze narrowed. “No one knows for certain. The prince was murdered—reportedly by Basi assassins. Radov claimed to have caught and hung the bastards, but there was no hearing held before a truthreader to confirm their guilt, and his body was never found.”

  Head rupturing, Işak tried desperately to focus. “Whose body, Captain? Please be clear.”

  “The prince’s, of course. The whole bloody affair supposedly took place in the midst of a sandstorm—the Nadori claimed it was how the bastards snuck up on their camp. It was treachery no matter how you cut it.”

  …the prince’s, of course…

  These words stabbed as knives into Işak’s gut, making him very ill. “And…who was blamed for this treachery, Captain?” he asked in a low voice weak with dread.

  “The Basi were blamed!” the captain growled as if this was a foregone conclusion.

  Işak saw spots before his vision, his head now a blinding agony. “No one else? No one…of the kingdom?”

  “Who was there to blame?” the captain balked. “All of the men who went with our prince were killed. His Majesty has ever blamed himself.”

  Işak sank back against the wall, his breath coming ragged, his head exploding repeatedly. Whatever patterns yet clung in concealment of his memory, they bit with a vengeance to prevent his continuing down this path of inquiry.

  It was with the greatest force of will that Işak pushed back his hood and used the same hand to untie the ribbons of his mask. He held the molded velvet in place while the captain watched him with suspicion deepening the severe angles of his face. Finally, battling a loathing sense of dread, Işak stepped forward into the dim light. “Tell me, captain,” and he lowered the mask with a shaking hand, “do you know this face?”

  Rhys recoiled. “What is it you do—a foul trick? You think to fool Prince Ean with some knots and an ill-conceived illusion? He wi
ll know the tru—”

  “DO YOU KNOW THIS FACE?” Işak’s demand rumbled through the cell, borne on currents of the fourth. The air crackled with his fury, and dust fell from the mortar between the stones.

  The force compressed the captain’s body into the corner, and he gritted his teeth against it. “Yes,” he snarled, glaring now with undisguised enmity, “but you’ve no right. ‘Tis the face of a dead man.”

  Işak knew it too.

  He fled from the cell, staggering into the walls in his haste to be away, to leave behind him that horrible truth and all it implied, a single thought pummeling him as he made a punishing retreat to his chambers.

  Oh, Captain, Captain…if only you knew!

  Fifty-Three

  “A man knows nothing of courage until he’s killed in

  another’s name.”

  – The Adept wielder Viernan hal’Jaitar

  Kjieran van Stone slipped from the shadows to follow the man in the black-chequered keffiyeh as he headed away from the Court of Fifty-Two Arches. The air was stifling beneath the leading edge of a storm that darkened the east. The briny air crackled with static, and Kjieran was on a countdown.

  The hourglass sands of his life were pouring swiftly through the narrows of opportunity, and he knew he had but few precious grains of time in which to act. A day, perhaps two.

  The changing had now claimed his torso up to his chest, both of his arms and his shoulders. Its darkness was spreading across his back now like the deadly flames of lava drawn from the earth’s molten core. An hour in the sea had scoured away the necrotic tissue that was once his skin. He could almost count the remaining flesh in inches.

  No longer did he fear his presence upon the currents or what they might reveal of his activities. By the time anyone read them, it would all be over.

  Kjieran saw his opportunity approaching and closed the distance between himself and his quarry. As the man passed a narrow alley, Kjieran took three leaping steps and grabbed him around the neck, spinning them both into the shadows.

  He’d caught the spy off-guard, but the well-trained man reacted quickly. He slipped from Kjieran’s grasp in a combat maneuver and attacked in return. Startled at first, Kjieran used his arms as a shield from the onslaught of hands and feet launched upon him, but the other in him…it knew better how to fight.

  His own hands became his swords, his feet as powerful as crossbow bolts, and his forearms and elbows were bludgeons that bashed and crushed. In seconds, he cast the spy spinning hither and yon. The strength in his new limbs was astonishing…and terrifying. In moments, he’d pinned the man beneath him.

  Pushing his hand across the man’s face to form the truthreader’s hold, Kjieran called upon elae. The lifeforce was barely within his reach—he was only able to control it by drawing in huge gulps. He therefore used a bucketful when a teaspoon might’ve sufficed, ripping the knowledge he desired out of the man’s mind. The fine mental tooling that was a truthreader’s finesse was quite impossible for him now.

  He didn’t mean to kill the Nadoriin. It came as a shock when he removed his hand and found dead eyes staring back. But nor did he mourn him. This man had served hal’Jaitar, and in that he deserved his end.

  Kjieran hauled up the spy and slung his body across his shoulders. Straightening with ease beneath the man’s not inconsiderable weight, he carried the corpse through the winding alleys until he found one that opened upon a drainage ditch leading to the river that ran beneath the city. He stripped the man of his fine robes then, of his keffiyeh and agal, and pitched his naked form into the darkness. Kjieran’s own garments followed into the sluice. When he emerged from the alley, he wore a dead man’s identity.

  But this was hardly different from any other day.

  With a glance around, Kjieran pulled the long fold of the chequered keffiyeh across his nose and mouth and headed off. It smelled repugnant from the man’s fetid breath, from the curried lamb he’d eaten for lunch and that particular scent of sand that permeated everything in the desert, but the cloth protected his identity from inquiring eyes. His gaze would still betray him, should anyone pay him heed, but Kjieran kept his colorless eyes downcast, and no one did.

  Thanks to the information Kjieran had stolen from the spy’s mind, he now knew that the secret offices of hal’Jaitar’s clandestine operatives were reached through an alcove just off one of the busiest passages in the palace. Keeping his head low, Kjieran made his way along the crowded strip, at last ducking between the two virginal statues that demarked the alcove.

  Finding that he was well concealed from the flow of bodies, he pulled the stinking keffiyeh off of his head and faced the bare wall with a frown. Knowing the trace-seal that would open the door and the motions to do so were not one and the same. It took more than a dozen attempts to make the pattern work, but Kjieran finally heard a click, and the stone panel slid ajar. He slipped silently through the parting and emerged onto the highest landing of a vast atrium. Five floors fanned beneath him, their stone-railed walkways gained by way of a hidden staircase whose location he’d failed to learn.

  Even a few days ago, this might’ve proven an insurmountable barrier, but there was naught left in Kjieran’s veins to fear from a fall, and little left to lose. The other who now resided within him pushed him to act.

  Standing in the shadow of the wall, Kjieran waited until all of the lower balconies were empty of eyes and then swung himself over the railing.

  The downward plunge came faster than he’d anticipated. His robes whipped up around his head, and he landed blind, tripping over his own feet into a tumbling roll. He banged against a wall with a thud he was sure the entire building must’ve heard. He scrambled to untangle himself from his robes and sought the shadows, both amazed and horrified that no bones had broken.

  Unsure where to go from there, Kjieran concealed himself until he saw two armed men approaching. He stepped from the shadows as soon as they had passed, grabbed both from behind and slammed their heads together with a dull thud. They slumped in his arms.

  Kjieran dragged them into the shadows and read them, ruthlessly dredging their unprotected minds for the knowledge he sought. It took some searching, but he gained Trell’s location, as well as an understanding of the labyrinthine passageways that would take him and his prince to freedom. His working left the men less than alive, their brains as slush. The truthreader in him recoiled at this truth, while the other delighted in it, but Kjieran had buried any thought of mercy in a far and fallow field. He left them where they lay.

  Finding the dungeons easily then, Kjieran made his way deep among their twisting passages, avoiding when he could, allowing the other to kill when he must. He finally gained Trell’s cell by way of a narrow spiral of stone steps that ended before a single door. Kjieran looked with frustration at the iron panel and the two keys required to unlock the bolts. The other arched a brow in contempt. Three kicks later, he’d so damaged the panel and its bolts that his fourth kick sent the door slamming against the inside wall with a scream of metal hinges.

  Kjieran had endured so much to reach that moment—Dore’s working, the Prophet impaling his consciousness, the slow devouring of his ravaged body, the corruption of his spirit—yet none of it had prepared him for the sight of Trell. A sickly pit opened in his stomach, and he rushed across the room to where his prince was nailed to the wall. He took Trell’s hanging head in his stone fingers—oh so carefully! as if handling a delicate butterfly—and found that he lived.

  His relief was as boundless as his fury. With vengeance blackening his gaze, Kjieran seized the six-inch spike that impaled Trell’s right hand and yanked it from the stone, flinging it across the room so violently that it chipped the rock on the other side of the cell. Five other spikes followed in its blistering wake, and the prince collapsed into his arms.

  Teeth clenched, Kjieran supported Trell’s unconscious form as he lowered him to the floor and looked him over. The villains had taken great care with this terrible
act to ensure it produced the gravest punishment with the least risk of life. No vital arteries had been severed, no bones broken, only Trell’s arms rendered useless. They’d healed the worst of the wounds around the spikes, that they might bring enduring pain, but now those wounds had been reopened, and the humour seeped from Trell’s arms to mingle with Kjieran’s tears. Nor were these his only wounds. He’d been brutally beaten. The bruising on his bare chest showed that someone had healed these wounds as well, though surely with no kind intent.

  The prince stirred, and his eyes fluttered open and gazed up at Kjieran. They were bloodshot and bespoke of unreasoning pain.

  “Your highness,” Kjieran murmured wretchedly.

  It took a moment, but then Trell seemed to focus on him. “I…know your face… but I don’t…know you.”

  “I’m Kjieran van Stone, your Highness,” Kjieran confessed with grief and guilt thick in this throat. “I am sworn in your father’s service. I was there when Raine D’Lacourte truth-bound you—would that Cephrael had closed his eye that abject night! We have none of us forgiven ourselves for what became of you.”

  Trell closed his eyes and managed the barest shake of his head. “I was upon my path,” he murmured weakly. “No one could have prevented it.”

  Kjieran gazed at him with misery and wonder both warring for purchase. Where had he been these many years? The question burned so desperately upon Kjieran’s tongue that it escaped him before he could quench its flame.

  “The Akkad,” Trell gasped. A wave of pain shuddered through him and he shut his eyes again. “The Emir… took me in, treated me as his own son. I led…a band of Converted—”

  “How touching,” came a sudden voice from the doorway.

  Kjieran spun his head to see hal’Jaitar standing in the threshold. The other within him reared to fight—