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

by McPhail, Melissa

  ***

  Gydryn val Lorian lay dying.

  As he labored over each indrawn breath, he clutched the amulet Kjieran had given him and marveled at the mighty forces of fate that had brought them together for their mutual ends. He’d watched as Kjieran’s black-robed figure climbed the flaming pyre and collapsed atop its peak, watched as the man’s shredded garments were consumed in smoke and flame. He had prayed for him, whispering the Rite for the Departed as the sun fell toward the horizon and smoke billowed upwards to pollute the sky.

  Gydryn expected his time approached as well. As the day lengthened and waned, he faded in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he dreamed. At one point, he thought he saw dark riders atop the far ridge, their silk garments swirling and twisting upon the winds. He’d felt a glimmer of hope stir in his exhausted soul, but then he’d looked a second time and realized they were only shadows cast by the falling sun.

  His dulled senses spent some time pondering the mystery of the words Kjieran had scrawled upon his chest and wondered on the news the once-truthreader had delivered of his sons; but in the end, thought itself became too difficult. Gydryn abandoned it, letting his attention wander as his life waned.

  He must’ve drifted off, for when he opened his eyes with a sudden sense of alarm, he noted that the sun had fallen behind the hills and a shadow lay upon him.

  The shadow of a man.

  Gydryn blinked away the abrasive sand and lifted his gaze. Piercing brown eyes stared down at him beneath a black and silver turban. The Khurd pulled his scarf free to reveal the angular features of a man in his prime and a strong jaw shadowed by a close-cut beard.

  “Prince Farid!” Another dark-eyed Khurd rushed up to join the first, but the latter drew up short as his gaze befell the king. “Is that—?” The man cut off his own question, his heavy black brows arched in surprise.

  The prince stared down at the king, and there was little of amity in his inscrutable gaze. He spun in a swirl of black silk. “Take him.”

  Hands reached for Gydryn, the world spun crazily, and the dying king fled into the darkness of oblivion.

  Fifty-Five

  “All was going as planned until they showed up.”

  - The Adept truthreader Cristien Tagliaferro,

  on the Paladin Knights invading the Citadel of Tiern’aval

  “Enough.” Ean doubled over. He rested hands on his knees and looked up under his brows at Markal, who stood across the field.

  They worked that day in a high meadow overlooking Niyadbakir and its majestic mountains. A storm was rising in the south; charcoal clouds had amassed against the mountains’ jagged emerald reaches, and the mottled sky between was becoming a battleground. The storm clouds advanced into the sun’s dominion, only to be broken apart by powerful shafts of arrow-light piercing down to the valley. Three silvering waterfalls cascaded beneath one such strip of light, the falls’ streaming from the high ridge to disappear into the emerald canopy.

  And Ean was tired.

  Tired of this training, tired of Markal’s unrelenting condescension and their inevitably contentious relationship…tired of trying to remember the life and education of a name he hadn’t claimed for centuries.

  “I don’t see why we keep having to do this,” the prince complained. The statement encapsulated his entire outlook at the moment.

  “That has ever been your problem,” Markal growled.

  Ean straightened with a frustrated sigh. “We’ve been at this since dawn. I’ve made you do a hundred different things. Surely I’ve proven I can work compulsion patterns.”

  Markal rested both hands on his staff and gave Ean a nightmare of a frown. “As ever, you utterly fail to grasp the point of the lesson. Patterning is most effective at the level of thought,” he quoted the referenced law. “But we are not merely working with the Sixth Law, Ean val Lorian. We are also working with the Ninth Esoteric.”

  “Which is about as comprehensible as Cyrenaic hieroglyphs!” Ean snapped with a hand flung to the valley at large.

  “Pure concept always overwhelms linear translation,” Markal stated, as if the Esoteric would somehow become clarified in repeating it for the tenth time. Then he added critically, “If the Esoterics were so simplistic a child could understand them, they would not be considered Esoterics.”

  “And the mouse said to the tiger, come hither and I shall tickle your ear,” Ean muttered, which he felt was just as helpful a statement.

  Markal arched a mordant black brow. “If you are so obtuse as to only comprehend simple concepts, Ean val Lorian, go back to your arithmetic and the abacus and leave Patterning to those with the wits to apply its laws properly.”

  Ean glared sootily at him, for there was really nothing he could say to that. After a moment of staring fractiously at each other, the prince grumbled, “Did we ever get along?”

  Markal arched brows and turned his back on him. “Have you ever done as you were instructed?”

  “Possibly!” Ean called after him, though he privately doubted there was even an ounce of truth in the remark.

  Markal retook his position ten paces away. “So. Let us proceed, since you are so certain of your understanding of the interrelationship between the Sixth Law and the Ninth Esoteric.”

  “Actually, I believe I said exactly the opposite.”

  Markal extended his staff like a sword before him. “I will now work the compulsion, and you will counter it by applying these laws.”

  “How am I supposed to ap—” A sudden force bombarded him so powerfully that he dropped to his knees and doubled over, and still the pressure forced him down…down…until his body lay flat and his head pressed sideways into the grass.

  Eventually Markal came and stood over him—long after Ean’s jaw had started aching, long since he thought his bones would shatter from the invisible monster squatting on his spine. “This is compulsion,” Markal informed him critically from above. “This is but a fraction of what they will throw at you. They will include thought layered with Form. They will have you thinking you are dead already—or worse.”

  Markal released the pattern, and Ean sucked in a shuddering breath and rolled onto his back, gasping in air in huge gulps.

  Markal watched him gravely. “You must be ready and alert for compulsion, Ean. Ever alert. It is a wielder’s prime weapon, for a man’s greatest weapon is his mind. Attack that, subdue that, and he becomes as putty to your will—far more useful than a sword when wielded with finesse and intelligence.”

  While Markal retreated across the meadow, Ean lay panting and staring at the charcoal clouds and trying to rein in his instinct to snuff out the man like a flame between his fingers. He could do it—he had the ability, he had the knowledge…or mostly he did.

  He grew increasingly frustrated by his inability to immediately access what was supposed to be second nature to him and decreasingly willing to endure Markal Morrelaine’s warped ideas of instruction toward reclaiming it.

  Finally, once his heart had returned to its usual rhythm, the prince rolled to his feet and leveled Markal a smoldering glare that relayed his desire for retribution.

  Markal arched a brow. “Again.”

  That time Ean readied himself. He embraced elae and crafted a mental shield to protect his mind from the fourth. When he sensed Markal wielding a fourth-strand pattern within the amassing tides of elae, Ean snared the pattern and pulled it apart like a violently unwinding a spool of thread.

  “No, no, no!” Markal slammed his staff into the earth to emphasize each exclamation.

  “Why no?” The rebuke honestly startled Ean. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  Markal cast him a look of supreme disapproval. “We are here for you to apply the Ninth Esoteric, Ean val Lorian, not to play at Cat’s Cradle. ‘Pure concept always overwhelms linear translation.’ Again.”

  “You know, if you’d ever bother to explain anything—”

  Markal had him on the ground that time drooling into the grass.

/>   When the wielder once again released Ean form his compulsion, the prince gathered enough self-respect to spit the grass from his mouth and cast Markal a baleful glare.

  “Patterning is most effective at the level of thought,” the wielder reminded him imperially.

  Ean resumed his place, feeling ill-used and mistreated and generally sullen. He couldn’t quite hold back the accusation that escaped him as their gazes locked. “You take perverse pleasure in tormenting me, don’t you?”

  “Pleasure?” Markal stiffened with indignation. “You think I relish watching the most gifted student I ever had the honor of instructing floundering like a mindless carp on dry land?” He stalked toward Ean wearing an expression as dark as dangerous as the looming thunderheads above. “You think I do this out of choice? That this is how I desire to interact with you? Saying little, teaching less, with my hands bound behind my back and the irons of Balance chained around my balls?” This last came out in a veritable roar.

  Ean stood stunned, his protests scoured clean by the might of Markal’s censure.

  Nor was the wielder finished with him. He stopped nose to nose with the prince, his dark eyes alight, the fifth singing and snapping as it rolled off his thoughts. “And you,” he snarled condemningly, shaking his staff at Ean’s head, “with your incessant whining and complaining, like a petulant child set begrudgingly to task. What is it you think we do here?”

  Ean stared at him. The wielder’s words had stripped him of his anger, of his vengeful desires—of all the petty emotions the man had rightfully accused him of. He knew only the shame of ignorance and the galling embarrassment of his own immaturity brought into stark illumination.

  “I…wronged you,” Ean confessing after a moment of contrite silence, ashamed at his actions and even more so by the bitter enmity he’d so unjustly harbored against Markal. “I thought—oh, it doesn’t matter what I thought.”

  Markal regarded him with grave reproach, though he did allow the fifth to disperse. “We all have our roles, Ean val Lorian,” he groused, “like them…or despise them,” and his scowl, which only deepened the shadows of his brown eyes, clearly conveyed the opinion he held about his own particular role.

  Markal turned on his heel and added direfully as he walked away, “Destiny governs us all, Prince of Dannym. Some of us are destined to live long lives with naught but toil and tribulation as our progeny; others live but for a single purpose and die by its end.”

  Ean watched him crossing the meadow feeling a different sort of shadow upon his soul. “Who decides our destiny?”

  Markal reached his mark and turned to face the prince. “That depends on whose game you’re playing.” He fixed Ean with his gaze and returned them to their lesson. “Patterning is most effective at the level of thought—this is the Law we seek to apply. Since this morning’s instruction has so far been unfruitful, let us pretend you are…well, you, and I shall for the moment be your enemy as he may more truly appear.”

  For the moment? Ean caught himself thinking, but he quickly quelled the thought, for he realized now that Markal suffered just as grievously beneath the yoke of Balance.

  Then he had no more time to ponder such things, for Markal threw a compulsion pattern at him. Ean snared it and unworked it, though he knew the man would be wroth with him for choosing that line of defense.

  Rather than stop to scold him, however, Markal immediately threw another pattern. Again Ean unworked it. But before he had it fully undone, Markal had thrown another, and very soon another…and another. Ean had his own mind shielded from the fourth strand as he worked to mentally dodge and catch each pattern, starting its unraveling before catching the next. But Markal’s patterns were soon coming too quickly, and Ean strained to keep his own mind shielded while unworking so many patterns at once.

  The patterns kept coming.

  Ean had to draw more and more elae to defend, protect and unravel—until there were too many patterns coming at him, too many still only half undone. Too much force. Too much motion swirling within his consciousness. His head started pounding with the strain. He tried to expand his sense of self, as Ramu had advised him, yet this only resulted in his feeling stretched too thin. In the effort to expand and contain simultaneously, he lost but the smallest fraction of his hold on the pattern that protected his mind—

  One of Markal’s patterns penetrated his shield.

  It bit with a vengeance.

  The malevolent pattern feasted on his mind, disgorging painful commands, forcing his head to the earth. Ean gasped and dropped to his knees. Everything fell apart—his shield dissolved utterly, whereupon the remaining vestiges of Markal’s half-worked patterns also pounced on him. Ean floundered helplessly within this barrage of unimaginable torments, unable even to find the lifeforce—unable even to think of it—and utterly incapable of seeing beyond the horrific images being shoved mercilessly into his consciousness. More painful than the images, however, were the commands the compulsion patterns made him believe, for they preyed and expanded on his own deepest fears:

  Your flesh is burning. Your bones are shattered.

  Isabel is dead…

  No hope, said the patterns; and weeping, Ean knew there was none.

  You are ruined, said the patterns, and Ean knew it was so.

  And then…something…shifted.

  The breath of a breeze stirred the curtain of his memory. It provided but a brief glimpse beyond the veil. Yet in that moment, Ean saw that he’d experienced this before, this decaying of his will. Moreover, he realized that he could throw it off—in fact, that he must at all costs. Desperation—necessity—seized him—

  The veil parted.

  Knowledge flooded into Ean’s mind as a dam burst wide. Brilliant, bounding knowledge came tumbling in voluminous waves. Suddenly Ean could see in stark illumination the patterns Markal was wielding against him. He could see their intertwined layers of form—the connective tissue of elae—holding the compulsion in place.

  He remembered that such tissue could be severed, and how to make it so.

  Do not counter force with force, channel it.

  Ean heard the echo of the Ninth Law as spoken by a different Markal, in a different era, when the wielder had been his mentor and friend, when Ean had led another man’s life.

  But he knew how to escape now—knew far more than he wanted to, suddenly, about compulsion and its many forms. That door had been reopened—nay, obliterated.

  With precise certainty, Ean grabbed hold of the nets of compulsion—took hold of the patterns themselves—and used their own power to set them spinning. A mental knife comprised of the fifth severed them in a splay of brilliance. The patterns shredded. Their vestigial remnants fled as night shadows before the sun.

  Ean was free.

  Reeling yet, as if inebriated from the vast cacophony of malignant thoughts that had held him in thrall only seconds before, Ean pushed to his elbows and then, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. With his newly restored knowledge came the understanding that the patterns Markal had used upon him were some of the most vicious ever devised. Yet amazingly, this was not what had him so shaken. No…it was a realization that stemmed from his newly restored understanding:

  His true gift was not in unworking patterns. It was his ability to see them.

  Ean knew only a few wielders were born with the unusual skill of unworking patterns, but being able to see a pattern while it was being worked by another wielder—this talent made him utterly unique. Ean understood now that his gift had ever been his liability, for it produced a tendency to think in ‘linear translations’ rather than in ‘pure concepts’—Markal’s very point from their lesson that day. But it stood also as a great boon, because in seeing the patterns, Ean knew instantly how to unwork them.

  Indeed, he had but to view a pattern to know its entire concept—including what strands it was comprised of. He could see how to pick any pattern apart, how to find the tiniest frayed end within it and unravel it all.

>   This then formed the crux of his talent, what made him unique among wielders, and undoubtedly why Björn needed Ean’s particular participation in his game.

  “I perceive that a light has suddenly been lit in the vast cavern of your obstinacy,” Markal observed.

  Ean cast him a long look. He reminded himself that Markal was trying as desperately to help him as he in turn was trying to pierce the veil—and that indeed, they had succeeded just then in regaining a crucial part of what Ean had lost. Yet with this knowledge regained, so also had an old sense of dignity, and Ean would not suffer its diminishment again.

  “You’re right,” the prince admitted, holding Markal’s gaze as he brushed grass from his hands. “Mayhap this is the fastest way to restore my knowledge. But I’ll endure it no more. We’re done.”

  Markal arched a black brow. “Is that so? Think you’re ready to face the Malorin’athgul, do you?”

  Ean held his gaze. He thought about that moment when Markal had so brutally subverted and used his own mind against him. In that dreadful instant, Ean had remembered being another man living another life, and he’d recalled a vow Arion had made in blood to never allow his will—or his power—to be usurped by another.

  “I don’t know,” the prince answered, all too aware of the mental casks that were still breaking open into his consciousness, knowledge spewing as wine from barrels burst, “but I know there’s nothing more you can teach me that will help me, if and when I do.”

  Markal leaned on his staff and regarded Ean with deep concern in his dark eyes. “Then you are perhaps at last upon the right path.”

  “Perhaps,” the prince agreed. He felt inundated now by the ever-growing deluge of Arion’s memories, which continued their flood of restoration, but one overarching desire accompanied them all: a need to pronounce a vow which Ean realized had been lacking for a painfully long time.

  Ean crossed the distance to where Markal leaned on his staff. Planting his feet before his teacher of ages old and new, he extended his hand. “Thank you.”