Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  And the currents…

  They sloshed and careened and tore through one another like the waves of a hurricane sea. Indeed, he felt as if he walked amid such a raging storm, for his mind was being constantly pummeled by energies made foul.

  Frustratingly, the currents revealed that Dore had fled across the Citadel’s weld, which lay not far beyond the Hall of Invocation. But the other man, their true enemy…he remained close. Likewise, a score of Mages who thought the enemy’s nightcloak of deyjiin would be enough to fool Arion—him, who could hear their rank thoughts louder than deyjiin’s roar, who could taste their ignoble breath poisoning the air.

  Arion cleansed his blade with a thought, hearing a whisper as the blood seared away. Would that he could so easily cleanse his conscience.

  “Gerald hal’Gere, Willem Stonewall…” Arion called off the names of the Mages whose life signatures he saw on the currents.

  With each new utterance, his anger increased exponentially. Whereas during the earlier battle he’d been fighting a faceless force of many, now he put names and countenances to the acts of treachery against Isabel.

  Fury rose on a wave of indignation, and he claimed the tumultuous currents for his own. A single thought of intent stole the storm of energy and rechanneled it back against the Mages.

  Power exploded through the room.

  The high windows shattered, gilded thrones splintered. The concussion sent a wave rolling through the stone floor, dislodging massive blocks of marble.

  “SHOW YOURSELVES!” Arion’s elae-enhanced voice brought to bear the righteous fury of every Adept who’d died that night.

  His words were still resounding in the chamber when a deep voice, smoothly contemptuous, stilled the reverberation.

  “Go on…” it goaded, equally elae-enhanced to fill the chamber, “present yourselves to the great Arion Tavestra.”

  The nightcloaks dissolved to reveal a score of Mages in various states of unbalance as a result of Arion’s working. Some were clinging to the walls or each other, others had fallen. Smoke came pouring in through the shattered windows, further obscuring sight, but now the currents revealed to Arion what the nightcloaks of deyjiin had been concealing from him all this time.

  Compulsion.

  Arion felt that truth as an agonizing stab to his conscience.

  These Mages were all under compulsion.

  To dictate a man’s actions with a binding compulsion and release him to accomplish one particular task required immense skill, but to compel multiple consciousnesses through decision and action like marionettes? These Mages were clearly still under the control of one individual mind—a powerful mind, to actively compel so many determinisms at once. Whether or not the other Mages Arion had already killed were being compelled or had willingly followed Dore, Arion would now never know.

  So ordered by their master, the Mages found their feet or righted themselves and started en masse towards him. Some carried Merdanti blades; others, talismans to aid in Patterning. Arion saw no remorse in their gazes, nor even any hint of the knowledge of what they’d done, only a black hatred and the will to destroy.

  Oh, Isabel…

  He’d thought he would be claiming traitors in her honor, but killing a being under compulsion was no better than slaying a dog for obeying its master. These men and women had no choice but to do whatever their master, his enemy, willed. Arion had no way of knowing if they were innocent or guilty of the sedition they’d participated in; their every act might’ve been against their own determinism, in violent opposition to their will.

  Or they might’ve been wholly in Dore’s camp from the start.

  Whatever their intentions had once been, they were intent on destroying him now.

  Arion saw the currents forming into patterns and threw up his left arm with a shield of the fifth. Even prepared for it, the bombardment of energy drove him to one knee. How could it not with dozens of powerful wielders on the other end of it, their minds and abilities usurped by one individual, their combined mental power focused into a weapon of singular intent?

  Grounding himself between violent energy and the immutable base of terra firma, Arion drew deeply on the fifth and engaged gravity’s effort to brace and support his own. A continuous onslaught of energy bombarded him as he struggled to stand up, jaw clenched. The currents plunged away from him in gargantuan waves, pummeled by the combined will of the Mages, while Arion stood within a crater of ravaged space, protected only by the force of his own will.

  Gaining his feet, he deliberated on his next choice.

  His enemy would use the Mages until their minds were a ruinous sludge; yet somewhere beneath the hatred and malice, the true beings remained—tortured, agonized…suffering.

  But innocent or no, they stood between himself and the enemy.

  Choices spiraled away from Arion like the whorls of an arabesque, but he saw only one path that led anywhere but ruin.

  He would have to make their deaths permanent. He couldn’t leave an opening for the enemy to reanimate them, as Malachai had done with his Shades.

  ‘…I would this bloody job did not fall to you…’

  By Cephrael’s Great Book, Arion wished the same!

  There was no more time to deliberate. He could feel himself weakening beneath the unyielding barrage of raw power.

  Forging the fifth into an impermeable shield, Arion grabbed the third strand, raised his sword and sprinted down time’s tenuous thread. The Mages wouldn’t feel his blade until after it had taken them. It was mercy, of a fashion.

  One swing of his Merdanti sword and Gerald hal’Gere’s head and body fell in opposite directions. Arion skipped through time. Another swing, another head tumbled. He skipped again. Flashes of seconds, moments stolen between breaths, thought split into fractions. He felled the next Mage, and the next.

  Six seconds gone, half a dozen Mages slain. Arion rode the forward edge of time’s tumbling wave. He gave them no recourse to their power. Even death couldn’t catch him.

  And then it was done.

  A score of decapitated bodies lay in an ever-widening pool of blood, but Arion was looking forward, not behind. He’d made his choice; he was walking his path. He had no other path to walk.

  On the far side of the dead, an archway opened into a long passage leading to the Citadel’s weld chamber. Arion cleansed his blade with a thought and started down it.

  A haunting chuckle followed him the entire length of the corridor, raising his hackles as a blade dragged along a raw nerve. Mirthless, cold, it raked painfully across his mental shields, a razor-edged plow sowing seeds of indecision, cultivating self-doubt, uncertainty and fear.

  Arion sensed compulsion in that laugh—whispering, invisible whorls of intent. A lesser mind would’ve been easily claimed by it. The currents raged around him, frenzied and frantic. They told him nothing.

  He entered the octagonal weld chamber and headed between the massive pillars supporting its vaulted ceiling of jewels and gilt. Slowly descending the wide steps between the pillars, Arion cast his gaze warily around. He knew nothing of his enemy save for the way the man’s will churned the tides of elae, but he suspected…yes, he suspected his nature.

  They’d been waiting for the Malorin’athgul to show themselves for a very long time.

  A patronizing chuckle disturbed the stillness of the room—a silence that was only apparent to those who couldn’t hear the roaring currents.

  “Ah…the great Arion Tavestra. We meet at last.”

  A man moved into view from behind a column. He was very tall and broad-shouldered, and he carried a Merdanti blade with the point held low. Shadows clung to his face, obscuring his features.

  Arion stilled on the stairs.

  “It’s a fitting irony, don’t you think?” The stranger waved a hand in idle fashion. “That in your attempts to save your Adept race, you go to such lengths to help destroy it?” He moved towards Arion, walking the outer circle of the octagon of pillars. “And most
pleasurable yet, to find that here, on the final frontier of battle, you—the magnificent Arion Tavestra—become the hand of my intent, no less a puppet to my will than those poor fools you’ve just slain.”

  Following the enemy with his gaze, Arion clenched his jaw and readied his patterns.

  “But then, what choice did you have?” The stranger’s tone dripped with malicious amusement while his steady steps brought him ever closer. “If you hadn’t killed them, they would’ve killed you, and living on thereafter, they would’ve served my will, even as you have done tonight.” The stranger pointed his weapon at Arion. “This is the lesson learned by mortals who take it upon themselves to challenge their gods.”

  Arion kept a tight hold on his anger and a tighter hold on his shields. “You’re no god of mine.”

  “But that is the fundamental understanding you lack.” His words sounded as the crisp shattering of glass. His blade, pointed at Arion, became the focus of his intent, and deyjiin blasted along it.

  Arion caught the bolt on his weapon, feeling its deadly zing even through his shield, and roughly slung the power to the stones. A huge swath of marble promptly dissolved into sand.

  The enemy chuckled. “Do you see? A god doesn’t need your consent, your saccharine adoration. He is power incarnate, as you will learn—”

  —the dream shifted, passing through veils of shadowed memories, images flickering in flashes of lightning pain, strings of tortured unmaking…and then—

  Arion lay gasping in darkness.

  His chest radiated a burning agony, while every other part of him ached with cold. Elae was draining out of him, pooling with his blood.

  A shadow moved, and the form of his enemy rose above him. He dragged a dagger dripping with elae out of Arion’s chest.

  Arion choked—pain radiated, a thousand times worse than before.

  Dear Epiphany!

  Breath wouldn’t come, for his lungs were full of blood. His gaping chest constricted in futility. Dying eyes stared into the shadowed face of his enemy, but all Arion saw was the man’s life pattern glowing on the currents, tormentingly whole despite Arion’s best efforts to unmake it.

  He managed a threadbare gasp—his mouth was too full of blood. “This isn’t…the end…of me.”

  The enemy leaned closer, coming nearly nose to nose. His dark eyes gleamed in the muted light. He flashed a sharp smile. “Come and find me. I’ll be waiting.”

  Then he licked his thumb and pressed it to Arion’s bloodied lips, a taunting, formidable farewell.

  And every molecule of elae in Arion’s body exploded—

  *—*

  Ean jerked awake with a shuddering gasp, his brain throbbing with the latent agony of that final moment, and his stomach sickly. He pushed hands to his head and curled his body forward, pressing elbows to his knees. A low moan escaped him.

  The First Lord had assumed the blame for Arion’s actions at the Citadel—a loyal, selfless act that had earned him extreme vilification from the other vestals, and most of Alorin and the Council of Realms by extension. Björn could not have known why Arion killed the Mages, yet he’d remained steadfast, determined to support Arion’s choices, trusting his decisions to the end.

  Ean exhaled a shuddering breath.

  He still felt the conflict of that choice. Arion had slain the Mages remorselessly, seeing no other path, yet there was no arguing that he’d killed them in cold blood. Perhaps there had been no better way.

  But Ean wondered…had Arion let the Mages live, would they have remained puppets to the enemy’s will, or might he have been able to save them from the compulsion at some later time, unworking the binding on their minds? If Arion had taken the road through mercy, would he have stood upon firmer ground when facing the enemy at the last? Had the compromise of slaying potentially innocent people caused Arion’s downfall?

  And where had come the betrayal Ean still sensed as such a cankerous growth on his conscience? Somehow he didn’t think it fed on guilt over the Mages’ deaths.

  And then there was that vision of the enemy.

  The Enemy…

  Ean felt cold upon recalling his voice, which was undeniably the voice from his many earlier dreams of unmaking. Would that he’d better seen his face, but whether blurred by dreams or Arion’s pain, the man’s features seemed but daggered shadows of contempt.

  He closed his eyes and let a latent shudder pass through him and away. Then he focused upon a particular thread of awareness.

  Isabel…he cast the thought to her across their bond, sensing her mind quickly at the other end. She opened herself to him with desperate welcome, but Ean hadn’t contacted her for reconciliation.

  Isabel, the Mages…they were all under compulsion. Arion saw no other path.

  He quickly closed his mind to any offered reply. He didn’t want her voice in his head, but he felt he owed her that truth at least. He certainly owned it to Björn.

  Then he remembered why he was on the balcony of Sebastian’s shattered rooms and the solution he’d landed on earlier…

  And he wondered why he still cared.

  Dawn had come while he dreamed of Arion’s last night. Feeling threadbare on many levels, Ean turned a weary gaze to the valley and the line of eastern mountains. There, beneath the gold clouds of sunrise, he imagined another path leading across the field of a different game. He saw endless possibilities for where his life might take him.

  They seemed more unreal than any of his dreams.

  Ean stood and went to find his brother.

  Ten

  “If you can’t escape the skeletons in your closet, you might as well teach them to dance.”

  –An old desert saying

  Franco Rohre stepped off the node into blazing, painful sunlight and an oven wind raking across him. He pushed a hand over his eyes and gazed out over the immense expanse of T’khendar’s Windlass Desert.

  Five arches demarked the nodecourt where he’d arrived, their columns of black marble carved with innumerable patterns. To his right, an agonizingly long set of stairs zigzagged up a jagged volcanic ridge where, hundreds of feet above, an obsidian pavilion overlooked the desert.

  Franco tried not to look to the south. He knew what he would see there well enough.

  Taking a deep breath of determination, he started up the long staircase leading to the pavilion with the sunlight blinding him and sweat soon running down his back. Despite his intention not to look, a constant part of him remained acutely and uncomfortably aware of the violent storm darkening the southern horizon. It was like the damned thing was calling to him, demanding his attention. The more he tried to ignore it…the more insistent he became on not looking, the more he had to look.

  When he finally spared a glance southward, he saw a black band of clouds crackling with electrical storms. It raged along the entire visible front. Above the dark tumult, angry red veins striated the sky. The firmament seemed the fragile webbing of a shattered vase and the horizon the mess of sludge seeping from its broken base.

  Franco had weathered this very storm beside the Great Master. He’d felt the thinning fabric of the realm; he knew how fragile T’khendar’s pattern had become in those aetheric places. At any moment the final filaments could give way to a creature of devastating power who was intent upon unmaking them all.

  And he knew it would’ve been Alorin suffering those storms—Alorin being attacked, its pattern unraveled—if not for the First Lord’s foresight.

  Breathing hard, yet feeling uncommonly chilled—for his Nodefinder’s senses were all too keen to the kinetic storm blackening the horizon—Franco rounded the final step on the stairs and lifted his gaze to the obsidian pavilion and its many open-air chambers.

  The First Lord had raised the palace directly from the volcanic rock, growing columns, walls and roofs right out of the stones that supported them. As with everything the First Lord created, the palatial structure offered beauty as well as function.

  Franco had barely caught
his breath before Dagmar appeared from beneath a shadowed arcade bearing an offering of chilled wine and a smile. “Greetings, Franco. It’s good to see you in the flesh after so many weeks.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” Franco admitted an equal reassurance in seeing the Great Master standing solidly in front of him. Dreamscape had been their only means of communication since Alshiba had summoned him to Illume Belliel, some weeks ago now.

  Dagmar drew Franco into the shade of the pavilion and the protection of Björn’s patterns, whereupon the arid desert air became noticeably more comfortable.

  In the center of the domed chamber, the First Lord, the Fourth Vestal Raine D’Lacourte, and General Ramuhárikhamáth were standing around a long onyx table studying a map of T’khendar that had been raised in perfect relief out of the block of stone.

  Ramu was indicating a strip of mountains and saying as Franco and Dagmar joined them, “…must’ve been in this area. It was a large tear—easily a league in length.”

  Björn looked up beneath his brows and gave Franco a smile. “Ah, Franco. Welcome. My oath-sister set you free at last?”

  “Not exactly, my lord.” Franco approached the map table and observed the many small red markers placed at numerous spots on the relief—so many more than when last he’d seen it. He lifted a look of alarm to the others. “Are these all places where T’khendar’s fabric is thinning?”

  Ramu answered darkly, “If by thinning you mean the Malorin’athgul Rinokh is doing his best to unmake the realm…then yes.”

  Franco suddenly really needed that wine. He drank deeply of it.

  Björn returned his gaze to the map. “Let’s see the nodes in that area, Ramu.”

  The drachwyr touched the relief and an illusion sprang into view—a map of T’khendar’s welds, projected in three dimensions.

  Franco observed it wistfully. Before Malachai’s war, weldmaps had been common throughout the realm. Now, centuries had passed since Franco had seen a weldmap in use the way it was intended.