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

by McPhail, Melissa

  “Stop calling me that!” Işak screamed. He turned and fled into the shadows, dragging his bad leg.

  Ean rushed after him. “Wait—let me help you!”

  He chased Işak down a wedge of darkness that lurked between a row of towering columns and the tall, stained-glass windows. He could hear the man limping ahead of him but moving swiftly, possibly heading for the doors. Only then did Ean notice the shouting of men from elsewhere in the castle.

  Needing to protect their solitude in the hall, Ean cast an illusion before the doors that any who approached might find them locked. Finishing this, he scanned the darkness for Işak and—

  The man crashed into Ean from behind, taking him down with a painful crushing of shoulder and hip into immutable stone. They struggled, with Işak grappling for Ean’s sword and he in turn trying not to injure the other man—for Raine’s truth, he’d been harmed enough already. But their tactile contact gave Ean what he’d been wanting all along—a clear view of Işak’s life pattern.

  Ean could see now the hundreds of spiny tendrils sinking into the flesh of the other man’s mind, see how they speared and stabbed and bled him mercilessly; how they held him captive to another’s will. He saw, too, that many of these patterns were bound with the fifth, and this was a more devastating truth to learn than any that had come before.

  But those patterns that weren’t so bound… Ean didn’t bother trying to discern what they were doing—it was enough to know they were malicious and parasitic and Işak their innocent host. Ean grabbed a mental handful and ripped them out like weeds, casting them forth into unraveling. Still, it was like digging for the man in a pit of quicksand, and the stuff was already far above his head.

  Işak cried out and rolled off of Ean. He snatched up his sword as he staggered to his feet and backed away, blade extended in a shaking hand. His eyes were wild, and his head jerked sporadically, alarmingly, not unlike a maddened animal.

  Overcome by the terrible understanding he now held, Ean also regained his feet. He held his blade at his side and looked Işak in the eye. “I will not fight you.”

  “Then you are a fool,” Işak hissed. His eyes bore into Ean’s while the ropy muscles of his neck twitched and jerked. “I am bound to my course. You cannot stop it.”

  “We don’t know that.” At least Ean willed it so. Surely there was providence in his coming here, in this meeting. It couldn’t be by chance. “Even now you must sense something of what I’ve just done to help you,” he said in a low voice, trying not himself to despair at being able to do so little. “Do you remember nothing of me? By Cephrael’s Great Book, I—”

  “Don’t you see it doesn’t matter, Ean?” Işak very nearly wept in speaking the words. “I am bound to him with the fifth!”

  “But I can help you—”

  “THERE IS NO HELP FOR ME!” Işak launched at Ean once more.

  The prince met him blade to blade, and the match again drew out the best in both of them—but now Ean would not risk harming Işak. He called up another pattern of the fourth, this time layered with form—a difficult and artful working to accomplish with the vast, formless energy of that strand while also engaged in battle. When he had it ready, Ean threw himself roughly back, and a shimmering veil speared up to enclose Işak in a ring of power.

  The wielder spun furiously around, trapped by the crackling energy. Işak tried a desperate counterattack, but Ean saw the pattern in Işak’s mind before he had it fully formed and ripped it out of his consciousness.

  Işak shouted a slew of curses then, vituperative and fierce.

  Ean approached the barrier. He lifted one hand in entreaty, his gaze pleading, begging understanding. He had to make Işak somehow see what he knew already to be true—that theirs was not a chance encounter, that this reunion must serve some purpose, even should that purpose be the undoing of too many years of violent injustice. “Can we not…talk?”

  The other man hung his head, but his shoulders and arms still twitched as violently as lightning within the violet-dark clouds of a storm. “If I cannot compel you,” Işak churned out through gritted teeth, not looking at Ean, “I must kill you.” He raised his head, and his eyes were vivid with pain as he hissed, “This too is bound with the fifth!”

  Then he released his pattern.

  He’d hidden it well as he crafted it that time. The volcanic force seared through Ean’s shield. The prince threw up a desperate pattern to protect himself as Işak’s working raged like a hurricane through the great hall. The massive doors burst in a splintering staccato. The chandeliers ripped from the ceiling, and the hall went dark as the heavy iron rings crashed resoundingly to the floor.

  And still the eruption raged.

  The roof strained and whined as if to contain the mighty force of Işak’s working. Then, with a final groan of protesting metal, the stained-glass windows shattered in a deadly splay of glass. Ean made his shield more solid and threw himself behind a column as razor shards exploded in every direction.

  The moment the shower of glass quieted, the prince cast his awareness desperately forth, but save for the patterns that yet hung in place seeking whispers of the fifth, the room stood empty.

  Ean got to his feet and looked grimly around, his lips set in a thin line. For all the devastation around him, the ferocity of that elae-storm was but a whisper of wind compared to the patterns that had been worked upon Işak.

  Gripped by a terrible fury with no target upon which to unleash his wrath, Ean walked to the twisted frame of one of the shattered windows. Beyond lay the luminous night and a thin strip of walkway opening onto the river, its dark waters lurking twenty feet below.

  A commotion from the near passage drew Ean’s sudden gaze, and he turned to see four men entering through the splintered doors. They each held a torch in one hand and a sword in the other, and Isabel walked between them. “Stay here and guard us,” she ordered. The men promptly turned shoulder to shoulder, barring entry.

  Merdanti staff tapping a quiet cadence to her steps, Isabel joined Ean’s side. “Your men are gone. A Nodefinder took them away when first the horns blew in warning.” She seemed to consider Ean then, whereupon the slightest furrow crossed her fair brow. “But this, I do not think, is what troubles you.”

  Ean turned and pinned his tormented gaze back upon a shadow that was making its way across the river. He could just make out the shining end of an oar as it lifted and dove into the mercuric waters. “I have to go after him, Isabel,” he said, swallowing back powerful emotions. He turned her an agonized look. “I won’t let him suffer like this—I won’t see such unforgivable use of elae!” He shook his head in desperate fury, his gaze haunted by what he’d witnessed, what he now knew. “Whoever I once was, this is the man I am now.”

  “I know.” She placed a consoling hand upon his arm, and he covered it roughly with his own, gripping her fingers even as grief gripped his soul.

  “I have to go after him, Isabel,” Ean said again, looking back to where the shadowed form now climbed the far riverbank. “He’s my brother.”

  Epilogue

  When he later looked back upon them, Tanis found his early days of travel with the zanthyr to be something of a blur. Phaedor was taking them deep into a high mountain range that Tanis didn’t recognize, and the zanthyr was neither forthcoming with their whereabouts nor their ultimate destination.

  Still, Tanis had never felt such happiness as being in the zanthyr’s company. Within Phaedor’s protective shadow, the lad knew sure safety. It didn’t matter where they were going, for Tanis would follow the zanthyr anywhere. Only his curiosity suffered.

  As they traveled, the zanthyr told him somewhat of their companions—of Prince Ean waking and the battle at the Temple of the Vestals, and of her Grace returning from a near fatal kidnapping with the seemingly resurrected Prince Trell in tow—which incredible fortune Tanis would have disputed outright if it had been anyone other than Phaedor telling him. But beyond speaking of these things that had
come to pass while Tanis traveled with Pelas, the zanthyr kept silent. His days with Pelas had been full of discussion. Now Tanis had long hours amid vast snowy reaches to dwell within his own thoughts.

  In these times of lengthening silence, where the patient trod of their horses’ hooves marked the ticking of the minutes and hours, Tanis couldn’t stop thinking about Pelas…except when he couldn’t help wondering about his mother. Thoughts of Pelas came with feelings of regret and loss and an immense worry over whether he’d done the right thing in leaving him. Never mind that Pelas was an eternal creature thousands of years old and surely could make it through life on his own. The lad knew Pelas yet needed him, and it pained him that he’d abandoned him so.

  On a brighter side, when he wasn’t fretting over Pelas, Tanis pondered the mystery of his mother with fascination. He spent many hours huddled in his fur-lined cloak—a gift from the zanthyr—wondering who she was, where she was, if she lived, and whether they would ever meet again. Then there were the questions of why she’d sent him away, whether he was really Agasi by birth, and why he’d been taken to the Lady Melisande to raise. So many, many questions. So many possibilities.

  Until Phaedor told him of the promise he’d made to his mother to protect him, Tanis had barely conceived of her as real. The only bit of memory he had of her was the vision Alain had helped him find so long ago in Chalons-en-Les Trois. Accordingly, she’d felt more dream than substance to the lad. But suddenly now his mother was a woman to whom the zanthyr had sworn a sacred oath—suddenly his mother was flesh and blood, and fourteen years of questions Tanis never knew he’d held had simply appeared, demanding explanation.

  The lad knew the zanthyr well enough to understand that getting answers out of him was a game of chance. If the dice rolled in his favor—that is, if the stars were somehow correctly aligned and Fortune turned a favorable eye and the wind had the right flavor or something equally indefinable and ridiculous—then Phaedor might deign to answer a question more serious than what they’d be eating for dinner. But the likelihood of all of these unknown mystical factors somehow occurring in the exact moment that Tanis decided to ask a question was like expecting the sun to set amid the same striated curtain of clouds each night.

  Still, he was too young and optimistic not to try.

  The sun had barely risen on their second day together when Tanis broached the subject. “My lord,” he’d said as they rode along a frostbitten path through stony foothills coated in rime and with the snowy peaks of the great mountain chain looming ahead of them, “will you tell me of my mother?”

  The wind lifted and tossed Phaedor’s raven curls as he sat upon his massive black stallion, spinning them into wild designs. He glanced over at Tanis wearing an endlessly unreadable expression, and to the lad in that moment, all the world seemed to turn around the zanthyr. Tanis remained ever in awe of this utterly mysterious and magical creature—no one made so indelible an impression or was so seemingly immutable as Phaedor.

  Just when Tanis thought his question would fall into the Cavern of the Eternally Unanswered, the zanthyr inquired in his deep purr-growl, “What would you know of her, lad?” His voice rumbled into the frigid morning like the resonant baritone of a mountain cave greeting the frost-bound meadow.

  Tanis brightened with sudden excitement. “Well…everything!”

  Phaedor grunted and turned back to face the path ahead. “Such would take a lifetime,” he replied, his breath coming as clouds upon the air, “and still I would not do her justice in the telling.”

  Tanis worked hard to quell his eagerness, or at least to knead it into something slightly less uncontainable that he might pose an intelligent question before the zanthyr lost interest or otherwise peremptorily ended the discussion. He squeezed his reins between his fingers and braved, “Is she…I mean is…” He whetted his lips and tried again. “What I meant to ask is…” The question was right there, yet the lad found to his dismay that he could not utter the words.

  Phaedor turned him a look of understanding, though regret also laced within it. “She lives, lad.”

  Tanis exhaled a great sigh of relief—only realizing in that moment that he’d been holding his breath. He gave the zanthyr a painfully naked look of hope. “And my…” He had to clear a sudden frog in his throat. “My, um…father?”

  The faintest hint of a shadow crossed the zanthyr’s face, almost imperceptible though the lad saw it plainly for knowing him so well. Yet he knew not what the shadow boded. “Your father is…not as you remember him.”

  “I don’t remember him at all.” Only Tanis’s mother stood out clearly in his mind—her large, colorless eyes, so like his own; her beautiful smile and voice so full of love for him.

  Phaedor grunted and looked back to the trail. “That is well, then.”

  Tanis gave him a long look, wondering at the duality of meaning within his words. Never a moment passed when Phaedor said something that didn’t also mean something else entirely—he spoke almost exclusively in double entendres. “Do we go to see them now, my lord?” Tanis couldn’t quite conceal the hope in his tone.

  “We walk upon your path, lad,” the zanthyr replied, which didn’t seem an answer at all—at least not to the question Tanis had been asking.

  He shifted his gaze to the jagged mountains rearing before them and thought his path was leading to places indecently cold. “Do you know when I will see my parents again, my lord?” he asked as he stared uncertainly at the razor-sharp peaks.

  “You speak as if I see the future, Truthreader.”

  “Only one part of it,” Tanis corrected.

  The zanthyr arched a raven brow. “And you imagine somehow that I do?”

  “I know that you do,” Tanis returned, giving the zanthyr a hard look. “I just don’t know how much of it you see.”

  The zanthyr turned forward again, but the shadow of a smile hinted upon his lips. “So it seems I’m a Seer now, too,” he observed in veiled amusement. “Fascinating, the number of human attributes you ascribe to me.”

  “More like preternatural,” Tanis muttered, to which the zanthyr really grinned.

  It was evident Phaedor wasn’t going to expound on this topic, however, so Tanis posed a different question—it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a hundred of them already lined up. “Why did you bind yourself to me, my lord?”

  It was such an astonishing truth the zanthyr had spouted off so nonchalantly to Pelas—he might’ve been merely commenting on his appetite or the length of his hair.

  “The answer should be obvious to anyone with the least knowledge of binding,” Phaedor remarked disapprovingly.

  “Apparently I’ve less than the least knowledge of it,” Tanis returned with a shrug. He gave the zanthyr a tart grin.

  Phaedor pinned him with a dark eye, beneath which Tanis felt his bravado measurably withering. After a long, uncomfortable moment of this scouring inspection, wherein all semblance of Tanis’s impudence scurried for cover, the zanthyr finally replied gravely, “For your protection, lad.”

  Each word landed heavily upon the boy, such that its significance claimed a stronghold within his thoughts. But four words, yet Tanis felt battered by the enormity of their meaning.

  He thought of his immunity to both Bethamin’s Fire and Pelas’s dark power and gulped a swallow. Could Phaedor’s binding be the source of this immunity? He knew nothing of the theory of bindings, but he’d heard enough stories of them to know that such feats were possible.

  He’d gained the truth, but not without cost. The zanthyr misliked answering questions ‘before their time,’ and he had a knack for making Tanis feel horribly unworthy whenever the lad managed to force an answer out of him. Exactly as had happened just then. Tanis dropped his gaze and stared at his reins. “I’m sorry.”

  Phaedor gave him a tolerant look by way of absolution.

  “But you would have me making assumptions!” Tanis blurted as an afterthought. It was a feeble attempt to justify his requiring a trut
h from Phaedor that, in retrospect, he hadn’t really been ready to know. It didn’t help him feel any better about having done it, but now the zanthyr was expecting him to make a point, so he looked back to him and muttered, “Assuming things isn’t such a good habit, you know. Assumptions are rarely accurate.”

  “Instincts, however, often are.”

  Tanis thought of all the strange choices he’d made lately and wasn’t so sure his instincts had been at all trustworthy. He asked, perhaps a bit more belligerently than he intended, “Why can’t you tell me more of my parents?”

  Phaedor cast him a wry look. “All knowledge must be gained in its time and place, lad,” he offered with the sort of tolerant gaze he only ever granted to Tanis. “Balance often hinges on a natural progression of events, on knowledge gained in its proper order and circumstance.” Tanis must’ve looked immensely dissatisfied with this answer, for the zanthyr chuckled and added, “Your questions are not unanticipated, Tanis. I would answer more of them if I dared.”

  “Would you?” the boy challenged. He’d heard the underlying truth of that statement, and it didn’t exactly match what the zanthyr had said. Not that what he’d said was untrue. This was the problem with asking questions of the zanthyr.

  In answer to the lad’s challenge, Phaedor flashed a wide grin, exposing the tiny fang teeth in the corners of his mouth. The sharp smile was a reminder to Tanis that for all his seeming omnipotence, for all his apparent adherence to the laws of Balance, the zanthyr was still a feral creature—fierce, and wildly unpredictable.

  “That’s what I thought,” Tanis grumbled.

  The zanthyr shrugged unapologetically. “To live within the swirling mists of mystery is ingrained in my kind, Tanis. We cannot but follow our nature.”

  “Maybe,” the boy answered, casting him a dubious look, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy tormenting the rest of us with one of your more insufferable attributes.”