But Ean remained.
A thousand hopes and fears flashed through his head in that short span of time, but none of them jeopardized his commitment. Creighton had died for him once, and now it was Ean’s turn to show his color. Beneath this troth, what fear could weaken him? What end could possibly threaten his resolve?
The malorin’athgul halted fifteen paces from Ean, his face a glaring, vicious display of his fury. The men regaining their feet between Ean and the man scrambled away, sensing even as mortals that his was a power beyond their reckoning. So did a circle spread in an ever-growing distance as men crawled with desperate will to free themselves from Rinokh’s seething anger.
But Ean remained.
The cold waves of deyjiin washed over him, but Rinokh had given no will to their purpose and so the power’s touch merely chilled Ean, drawing gooseflesh and shudders from his already stressed system.
The zanthyr had vanished. Ean was glad of it, though, for he wanted no other lives upon his conscience.
“You,” hissed Rinokh, the word sounding a curse upon his tongue, “should have died.”
Ean felt his malice, the waves of deyjiin shifting—altering—to reflect subtle changes in his will. The prince sensed that the only reason the man had not yet attacked him again was the mystery of his survival.
Somehow he found the courage to reply, but where the words came from, he didn’t know. “I told you once,” he said, surprising himself with the strength in his voice, “Balance is with me.”
“Balance,” the man spat. “You know nothing of it.”
“And yet here I stand.”
The malorin’athgul’s lips drew back in a snarl. He pointed a hand at Ean and the prince felt his power electrify, readying to be channeled. He braced himself, and—
Creighton materialized between them just as Rinokh released deyjiin. The power flowed into the Shade, who stood with an expression of grave regret. Ean felt only its fringes harmlessly washing over him.
In that moment, he did as Creighton had instructed. Though he’d feared he wouldn’t muster the resolve to once again attack Rinokh, Ean found it surprisingly easy to pierce his awareness toward the Malorin’athgul. Once again, his spear glanced off the man’s hardened mind, but this time it left a chink, a handhold, the tiniest unraveling thread. Ean latched onto it.
Rinokh meanwhile roared in fury at being balked. He tried to strike the Shade out of his way, but his arm passed through his body. Startled, he clawed for the Shade with both hands, but though Creighton stood clearly before him, Rinokh could not find purchase upon his person.
Momentarily distracted from Ean by this new mystery, the malorin’athgul stalked Creighton with predatory fascination. “You should not exist,” he declaimed, palms raised before him. Power leapt from his hands into the Shade, who seemed to simply devour it within his raven-clad chest, his expression never wavering.
“It’s time, Ean,” came a sudden voice from behind, and Ean nearly wept with relief that Franco had finally made it there. The man looked hardly steadier on his feet than the prince was—and certainly he was a good deal bloodier—but he slipped a looped rope around Ean’s wrist and tugged it tight. “Are you ready?”
Ean only half saw him, for he was concentrating on the one thread extending from Rinokh’s mental shield. He finally had a firm hold upon it. “I’m ready,” he said.
He closed his eyes to better hold the thread, and he pulled.
***
To Raine, everything seemed to happen at once. The Shade somehow slipping inside his spell, the sudden infuriating loss of his wielders, and then the man—the strange, malevolent man…
At first, from so far away, Raine thought the man to be the Sundragon Şrivas’rhakárakek, who he’d battled so long ago, but where Rhakár exuded arrogance, this man seethed with enmity. Instinctually Raine opened himself to elae—
What he saw sent him staggering.
The currents of elae were rippling away from the intruder in gigantic waves—not from any working of his design, but as if in abhorrence to his very being. Raine had never seen anything like it—not even when Shades worked deyjiin did such a disturbance occur. The significance was beyond imagining.
It cannot be! His blood turned to ice in his veins.
And then the stranger erupted.
Only because Raine was already Patterning to protect himself from the battle was he spared the brunt of the blast. Still the shockwave hit him with incomprehensible force, pitching him off his feet to fly several paces through the air. His men were flattened beneath the onslaught, dominoes falling as the blast exploded outward. The walls of the very temple shook, and dust showered down from the ceiling.
The Shades who’d been strung out in a line against his men simply dimmed and faded, ostensibly returning into the one form from which they’d come. The stranger stalked across the room then, but Raine hardly noticed him, for the currents held him captive, his mind struggling to comprehend what his eyes observed.
Where the man had been standing remained a mottled grey circle, and it took precious seconds for Raine to understand what it meant. But then he knew.
The land itself had been consumed of life.
He devours the fifth, Raine realized, growing colder still as the terrifying understanding hit him.
For a heartbeat he stared, stunned to inaction by the formidable implications of this man’s existence. Then he noticed the virulent stranger stalking across the room and realized who he was heading for.
Ah, Cephrael, no!
Raine jumped out of his stupor and rushed among the fallen. “Get up! Get up!” he roared, rousing the men nearest him, some of who were just beginning to stir. “He’s getting away!” So intent upon his purpose he was that he nearly ran into Gwynnleth, who rushed up with Carian at her side.
The Avieth took Raine boldly by the shoulders. “You must stop this senselessness! You must let Ean go!”
Raine swept her aside. “If you would help Ean, help me! Rouse the others!”
Gwynnleth leveled him a look of indecision, but then she moved to the task, and the islander followed her lead. Soon the zanthyr and Seth were also moving among the men, and in short order easily a hundred had been restored to their feet.
Raine wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, but he knew he had to stop the stranger. As he looked urgently across the distance, the scene stunned him yet again: the man was pressing an advance upon the Shade, channeling power into him in a never-ending stream, and the currents were wild around them, a hurricane-tossed sea of choppy peaks and sharp-edged waves.
“Epiphany protect us,” Raine breathed, momentarily awed, his shock complete. His gaze darted to the zanthyr, who stood now with Seth, and he knew then that Phaedor had spoken the truth about the man’s dark nature. By Cephrael’s Great Book, how was he ever going to convince Alshiba when he himself would never have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes?
“Stop that man!” Raine ordered, and to the soldiers’ credit, they rushed to capture the fell creature who was stalking the Shade across the hall.
Time stretched before Raine, lengthening as it seemed to slow. Desperately he watched his men running to attack the man who was pressing the Shade on the retreat while his power ravaged the currents with wild abandon, and then Raine’s gaze found Ean, saw the course upon which the…malorin’athgul—even in his thoughts Raine stumbled over the word—was in vicious pursuit.
Raine blanched.
He could predict the certain end. He knew his men would not make it there in time, but with elae to fuel his strength, he could. He sprinted toward the advancing line; and seeing him go, a puzzled Gwynnleth and Carian followed.
“Ean!” Raine shouted as he pushed through the ranks of his men, scattering them before him in his haste. He finally broke through the front line and was within ten steps of the prince when the world went white.
The last thing Raine remembered was the ghastly look on Rinokh’s face.
&n
bsp; ***
Ean heard someone call his name over the sound of running men, but he dared not shift his attention off that one fragile thread. He didn’t know what pattern the thread was part of, but Creighton had told him enough to understand that it was crucial that Ean didn’t let go. So he held on, putting all of his mental energy behind it. His face reddened with the effort, his breath came in ragged gasps when it came at all, but he kept tension upon the line until…
Rinokh suddenly spun with a hiss, his face contorted with fury, and Ean felt a mental jolt as the man lashed back at him. He jumped toward Ean with lethal intent, crossing the distance in mere seconds, his hands extended, and the prince saw power erupt—
Creighton launched into Rinokh, ripping him off his feet, and they tumbled past just inches from Ean’s chest. Rinokh snarled in a language that sounded as foreign as it was dreadful as he and the Shade slid across the floor. His power revolted against the Shade’s affront, battering Ean with angry ridges, but Creighton had Rinokh clenched in a vice-like embrace, and he dragged him inexorably toward the point where Franco had vanished.
Ean dared not even hope. All of his effort was on holding that thread. His entire body trembled beneath the onslaught of deyjiin, which emitted from Rinokh riotously, the power every bit as antipathetic toward life and elae as it would’ve been had Rinokh put will behind its intent.
And then something changed. The Shade reached the point where Franco had vanished, and Rinokh’s face became a mask of horror.
Power erupted.
Ean flew through the air. He landed with a crunch of bone and his head snapped backwards, bringin a blinding flash of pain, but still he held onto the thread. He felt something heavy on top of him and tried to get his breath, tried to push whatever it was off, but it might’ve been part of a statue for all he could make it budge.
And at the other end of the thread, he felt something shift, like the tensile string had finally snapped. Suddenly the thread was unraveling, tumbling back upon him in huge waves, forming piles of ethereal silver all but burying his awareness.
Undone.
Whatever it had been, it was no more.
Ean didn’t think he’d actually unworked Rinokh, but he had succeeded in holding onto the thread of his being as Creighton pulled him across the node; and the distance, if not the force of traveling unprotected along the very pattern of the realm, had unraveled the entire pattern, woof and warp.
As the ringing in his ears began to fade, a terrible rumbling took its place, and Ean realized what he’d thought was his own body shaking was actually the floor beneath him.
Finally the pressure upon his chest lessened, and Ean blinked to focus on the zanthyr’s emerald eyes looking into his own. He managed a rueful grin. “We have to stop meeting this way.”
The zanthyr got to his feet and hauled Ean up beside him with one arm. Ean swooned. He gave the zanthyr a look of wondrous gratitude, overwhelmed by his unrelenting, if inexplicable, protection.
But there was no time for thanks. Even as Ean was trying to wrap his mind around what had happened, Raine’s statue began crumbling. A grey miasma was spreading across the stones devouring everything it touched, turning rock to sand, wood to ash, and any man unlucky enough to be caught within its embrace into dust. The prince looked through the temple and saw to his horror that the entire building was disintegrating.
Raine’s men, those who survived the second blast, were already running. Ean spotted the Vestal himself rousing not far away, and Carian was helping Gwynnleth to stand just beyond Raine.
Ean looked back to the zanthyr too choked with emotion even to form words.
Phaedor gazed solemnly back. “Farewell, my prince.”
“Come with me,” Ean choked out. He was suddenly desperate to stay with the zanthyr.
“Who would then stop this destruction? Deyjiin will continue its consumption until there is nothing left of our realm.” Phaedor shook his head and placed a hand on the prince’s shoulder. “Take care, my prince. May Fortune’s eye remain upon you,” and with one last look entreating caution, he turned and swept across the crumbling temple toward Raine.
“Ean!”
The prince turned unsteadily toward the voice.
Franco stepped off the node looking singed and holding tight enough to his end of the rope attached to Ean’s wrist that his knuckles were white. Ean could only imagine the forces Franco had endured to hold the node open long enough for the Shade to pull Rinokh across, and he didn’t want to imagine what must’ve occurred on the other side of Rinokh’s wrath.
Franco grabbed the prince into his arms in a relieved embrace. In that moment, the Fourth Vestal’s statue toppled and fell. It shattered upon the stones with a thunderous roar, and huge clouds of dust erupted in its wake. The Espial stared through the haze and locked gazes across the distance with Raine himself.
“Dare not follow us, my lord,” he warned. Then he pulled Ean roughly against him and stepped back across the node.
***
Raine regained consciousness with a gasp. Slowly sitting up, he saw that he’d broken his fall on a man who himself had been impaled on the sword of a third, the blade narrowly missing Raine’s shoulder. As he climbed off the dead man, Raine noted that similar ends had found many of his men, who’d been tossed and pitched like flotsam on a storm-ravaged sea. A groan behind him drew the Vestal’s eye to where Carian was helping Gwynnleth to rise, and all across the gallery, men regained their feet, but no sooner did they do so than they broke into a mad rush to escape.
Rinokh’s fell power had shaken the very foundations of the temple, and now it was crumbling down upon them. To the accompaniment of a deep and threatening rumble, stone dust streamed like waterfalls from the dome as the marble disintegrated beneath deyjiin’s consumptive wrath. Pillars crumbled, broke and tumbled, and the floor turned a mottled grey and fell away into sand, opening huge pits of darkness into the levels below.
Raine looked around desperately until he saw across the distance that the zanthyr had Ean in hand. He shook his head in amazed wonder, but just as quickly his expression turned to dismay, for Franco Rohre appeared behind Ean.
Just then Raine’s own statue crumbled and fell with a thunderous crash. Raine threw an arm across his eyes, and when the dust cleared, Franco had Ean in his arms.
“Dare not follow us, my lord,” the Espial shouted. Even as Raine lunged toward him, Franco and the prince were gone.
“Don’t!” The zanthyr was suddenly beside him. He grabbed Raine’s arm, holding him back.
Raine shoved him off. “What will Björn do with another fifth-strand Adept?” he hissed. His fury at losing Ean far overshadowed the devastation around him; it threatened to overwhelm all reason. Four quick steps and Raine grabbed up Carian by the coat, dragging him forward. “We’ve got to follow them!”
Gwynnleth shot the zanthyr a telling look, so much encapsulated in that brief, fervent glance, and then she rushed after the Vestal .
“No—Gwynnleth!” Seth shouted from across the hall. He surged into the form and flew toward her through the showering marble sands, but he was too late.
Carian reached for Gwynnleth’s hand even as he grabbed Raine’s arm, and then they were all three leaping across the node, vanishing a second before Seth dove down, capturing only empty air in his gilded talons.
Across the portal, Raine landed on his hands and knees in sand, momentarily dazed. He took one look around, however, and swore furiously. “How could you bring us here?” he hissed. “Are you mad?”
Carian’s eyes widened as he realized where they were. “No,” he declared in his own defense, slamming a fist into the garnet sands, “this isn’t right! The node opened onto a passage—with tapestries! I’m telling you this isn’t where it leads!”
“This is where it led,” Raine growled through gritted teeth.
Carian sank onto his knees and pushed a hand through his tangled hair. “No,” he insisted, looking around in dismay. “I saw h
im travel it, I…” Abruptly his words trailed off and Raine saw understanding come into his gaze.
“What?” asked the Vestal, catching only glimpses of his strongest thoughts. “What do you know?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the pirate returned. “We’re here now, and here we’ll stay.”
Raine’s expression was grim as he locked gazes with Carian. “T’khendar,” he murmured even as Gwynnleth began to scream.
***
The zanthyr watched Seth swoop low, and then, with a raucous, angry cry, he flew upwards, soaring through the shattered dome and out into the night.
Waterfalls of shimmering marble sand poured down around Phaedor, forming great piles upon what parts of the floor remained, the temple itself crumbling now at an alarming rate, but still he remained. His ancient eyes watched the currents, seeing how they shifted and changed, noting patterns that were beyond even Raine D’Lacourte’s skill. So it was that he saw the subtle glint come into the second strand and lifted his eyes just as the man stepped across the node.
He wore a jacket the color of sky, and his glossy dark curls had not changed in all the centuries they had known one another.
Their eyes locked.
The temple instantly became so charged with elae that the slightest misthought could have ended their existence. With two fifth-strand adepts working elae in such close proximity, the very air was alive and just barely containing its own power. An odd sort of elation could be sensed between them—a harmonic of serenity and regret. For seconds—seconds that could have been hours—neither moved nor spoke, yet so very much was communicated though that interlocking of equally depthless eyes…through the bond that bound them still.
It was a rare moment.
“It’s been a long time,” Björn murmured, finally breaking the silence.
Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One Page 101