“I accepted those parts of your creation that seemed to fit with my design. Ah, Tanis-mine, I knew the moment I saw you that our opposing natures would call to one another, but I had no idea you would find your place next to me so instinctively.”
Tanis tried to quell the riotous feeling in his stomach, which was less a response to Sinárr than a battle against that unbalanced feeling of almost falling. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Precisely my point—it came as naturally to you as it does for me. We were made for one another, Tanis.”
Tanis was wondering how long he was going to be able to just stand there without falling off the edge of all things sane and reasonable when Sinárr gave a desirous growl and released him. “Ah! But this should not be so quickly over.”
What shouldn’t be over so quickly?
The Warlock walked towards the railing, a tall form, striking of feature, and oddly…solid. In fact, he appeared surprisingly solid in the world of his own creation. He wore the same black pants and velvet coat as had graced his form in Alorin, but now he’d gathered his long ebony hair into a thick ponytail bound with silver. Tanis didn’t for a minute believe this was Sinárr’s true form. He wondered, in fact, if Sinárr had any humanlike form at all.
The Warlock spread his hands along the railing and leaned slightly forward out over the world he’d crafted from the aether of Shadow.
Or at least the illusion of a world. Tanis had to keep reminding himself of that.
Sinárr’s golden eyes lifted to the unearthly demarcation where the clouds dissolved into rose and violet gasses, with the star-studded backdrop of space opening a depthless void behind. He assessed this point for a long time. Then he smiled, revealing very white teeth, and turned to Tanis with unexpected fervor—
Suddenly he stood directly in front of Tanis.
The lad drew back with an intake of breath.
Sinárr looked him over fervently. For all his smile held a certain aesthetic charm, it was not unlike the predatory grace of a panther or a coiling asp. Its inherent deadliness bled all of the beauty out of it.
“Ahh, Tanis…” Sinárr seemed oddly reluctant—to or from what, Tanis couldn’t say, but there was a restrained quality to his manner. “Just the sensation of you…” he touched Tanis’s cheek with his thumb and closed his eyes.
Tanis felt the unmistakable sensation of deyjiin flooding into him and clenched his jaw, steeling himself to endure whatever would follow…yet what followed was an opening through which he sensed Pelas across their binding.
Tanis pulled Sinárr’s hand down to his heart, hoping the firmer contact with the Warlock might help him sense Pelas more clearly. He pressed both of his hands over the Warlock’s own, binding it close.
Sinárr regarded him with startled curiosity, but Tanis cared only that the flow of deyjiin had restored his connection to Pelas.
Pelas!
Pelas’s mental reply came on a flood of hope. Tanis! The lad sensed his bond-brother reaching for him—
Sinárr snatched his hand away.
Pelas vanished from Tanis’s mind.
Disappointment stabbed the lad. His bond-brother had felt so close, as if their fingers were only inches from touching, inches from reuniting. He lifted his eyes to the Warlock and found him staring at him, which made the moment worse somehow.
Sinárr looked him over again speculatively.
Tanis was fairly sure that nothing good could come from Sinárr’s speculation.
“My…but you are a delicious torment. But come, our meal is served.” The Warlock extended a hand to indicate a table at the far end of the balcony, where servants were just then unveiling domed platters and pouring wine into crystal goblets.
None of them had been there two seconds ago.
‘…He wants you to believe all of this is real…’
Tanis pressed palms to his eyes. Sinárr’s illusion seemed utterly real. It was not unlike the experience of seeing his mother appear in his bedroom at the Villa Serafina, or joining his mother in Dreamscape, and yet this experience was so wholly unlike those others that it felt entirely surreal at the same time.
“Tanis, will you have some wine?”
Tanis dropped his hands to discover that he was sitting at the table with Sinárr, who was extending a crystal goblet towards him.
Of everything he’d experienced thus far, this was the most jarring. Tanis resisted the urge to grab the seat of his chair and spin a look around, just to be sure they hadn’t also moved into a different realm in the blink of an eye.
With effort, he met the Warlock’s gaze—which in that moment seemed infuriatingly benign—and forced a swallow. Then he took the wine. For a moment, he studied the sanguineous liquid that filled the glass. He doubted imbibing an illusion would calm his nerves overmuch, but he drank it nonetheless. It certainly tasted like wine—really good wine.
It was terribly confusing.
Tanis lowered the goblet and gazed again at the dark fluid. “Mérethe says none of this is real.” He lifted his eyes to Sinárr.
The Warlock sat back in his chair, the wings of which extended above his head. He seemed amused. “What is reality? You tell me, Tanis, Adept child of Alorin.”
Tanis was opening his mouth to respond when he realized he’d never actually tried to define the word before. He’d been about to say it was something that could be touched, tasted or sensed, yet by that definition, everything in Sinárr’s world would qualify.
The Warlock smiled. “I’ll tell you what reality is, Tanis. It is what you and I agree that it is.”
Tanis frowned at him. “I didn’t agree to any of this.”
Sinárr’s golden eyes sparkled. “Did you not?”
Tanis thought of those early moments of disorientation when he’d tried to impose some shape upon his perceptions. He didn’t at all like the conclusion he came to.
Sinárr chuckled as if hearing his thought. “When you are bound to me, we will create worlds together. Then reality will be what we two share.”
Tanis’s eyes flew back to his. “You…” he barely found the breath for words, “you want me to create worlds with you?”
Sinárr’s eyes glinted like sunlight shining through a golden glass. “With such lifeforce as you possess, Tanis—imagine what we could create together.”
Tanis felt a desperate protest welling. He pushed his goblet away from him, wishing he was pushing himself away from Sinárr. “What if I don’t want to be bound to you?” He stared at the tabletop, searching frantically for a coherent thought. His suddenly pounding heart seemed to have chased lucidity away. “If I don’t want…that…we would find no agreement. We could have no mutual creation.”
Sinárr sipped his wine and eyed Tanis hungrily over the rim. “You will be bound to me. My will shall be yours also.”
Tanis forced himself to hold the Warlock’s gaze. Then he forced himself to take a deep breath and let it out slowly, and thought logically. “If you bind my will to yours, Sinárr, anything made together will only be your creation.”
Sinárr frowned at this.
Tanis retrieved his wine and drank all of it in several large gulps. It did unfortunately little to lessen the hollow feeling in his chest. He felt a bit like a condemned man arguing with the headsman, just delaying the inevitable.
Once more he tried imagining a different end than staying with Sinárr—taking Mérethe and fleeing together, Epiphany knew how, or overpowering the Warlock and using some means he hadn’t yet discovered to contact Pelas—but these contemplations left him feeling unbalanced. Still, he couldn’t believe he was fated to become a Warlock’s pet Adept. That could not be his path.
Sinárr motioned to the meal. “Why not eat something? I’m given to understand that mortal bodies need sustenance.”
Tanis wondered but dared not ask what sustenance the Warlock lived on. He turned his attention to the platters of food: fowl and hare, even a stuffed young pig. Tanis frowned at it, struck by a
thought.
“Is it not to your liking?” Sinárr inquired solicitously. “You would prefer some other dish? I was under the impression—”
“The food is—there’s nothing wrong with the food.” Tanis sank back in his chair with a powerful exhale. “It’s…I was just thinking…if I had the power to create worlds—universes even—any way I liked…”
The Warlock eyed him speculatively. “Yes?”
Tanis ran a hand along the chair arm. “I don’t think I would construct my world in such a way that for any living thing to gain energy, some other living thing had to die.”
Sinárr arched brows in surprise. Then he relaxed into another one of those dangerous smiles. “You cannot see how aligned we are already, Tanis-mine. When we are of one mind, you shall weave elae into Alorin’s native patterns, and I shall weave their inverteré opposite, and the two patterns binding together shall form four dimensions—a world that will be real, as you say, to anyone.” He leaned towards the lad and added with a passionate fervor in his golden gaze, “I want this, Tanis.”
Tanis pushed a palm to one eye. The prospect of being bound to Sinárr made his stomach feel like worms were writhing in it. He decided to change the subject. “Why do you make your world look so much like Alorin when you could create it any way you want?”
Sinárr settled one hand behind his head and leaned sideways in his chair. “I like your world. I’ve missed roaming freely there.”
“Warlocks haven’t walked our realm since the Before, thousands of years ago.”
Sinárr arched a brow. “Has it been that long? Your time and mine are not coincident.” He gave a contemplative smile. “I well recall the days before your Alorin joined Illume Belliel’s Council of Realms. We Warlocks enjoyed many freedoms.” Sinárr leaned forward to take up his wine again. “Warlocks cannot tear the binding fabric between Shadow and the Realms of Light, else we would’ve long returned there to treat with elae’s children.”
You mean to enslave them?
Tanis rubbed uncomfortably at one eye. The outline of a picture was starting to form, but its shape remained a dim impression, the faintest tracing on a sun-bleached canvas. “I don’t understand. If you like our world…” it seemed improbable, though Sinárr surely had no reason to lie to him, “why are you allied with Shail against us? He wants to destroy Alorin.”
Sinárr arched a brow amusedly and sipped his wine. “Does he?”
Tanis spied him narrowly. “You know that he does.”
Sinárr chuckled. “Have you still not realized the truth, not even with all your many gifts?” He leaned forward and pinned the lad with a look as unsettling as it was compelling. “Shailabanáchtran works illusions as readily as any Warlock. Nothing with him is as it seems.”
“But he’s planning some sort of rebellion with the Danes. He kidnapped hundreds of Adepts for them.”
“Are you certain about that?”
Tanis gave him a hard look. “I’m certain he kidnapped hundreds of Adepts. I was there. I saw them.”
Sinárr smirked. “Shailabanáchtran doesn’t give a whit about the Danes or their war with the Empire.”
“But then why did he take all of those Adepts if not for the Danes’ rebellion?”
Sitting back again, Sinárr arched a brow and smiled into his wine. “Whyever indeed?”
Twenty
“Let the birth of each new day be your own rebirth; grow, learn, love, admire. Revel in possibility.”
–From the writings of Epiphany’s Prophet
Gydryn val Lorian, King of Dannym, stood on a balcony, gazing across a great walled city filled with glittering domes. The circle of civilization spread as a lake amid the russet land, buildings too bright beneath the brilliant blue sky, sparkling diamonds in a landscape bleached of color by the relentless M’Nador sun.
Little had Gydryn known, as he’d lain shedding his life’s blood into the searing sands, that the Nadori sun had been bleaching him, too. Those scalding rays had burned away the lies that had darkened his soul for a decade, cleansing him of false hatreds. Now, like the colorful mosaic walls of his rooms, Gydryn’s spirit shone once more with glorious hues.
In the orchard that spread beyond his rooms, white-turbaned men capered among the high palms, their fronds the only green to be seen for miles.
Raku.
How indescribably odd to be standing in the very oasis city his generals had spoken so fervently about needing to reclaim. Odd? No…the word did not even begin to describe the bizarre turn his life had taken.
From the moment Spymaster Morin d’Hain’s letter had reached Gydryn aboard the Sea Eagle with news of Radov’s alliance with the Duke of Morwyk and the Prophet Bethamin, events had begun tumbling down an increasingly implausible slope—from a vicious rumor that his middle son still lived, to Viernan hal’Jaitar’s attempted assassination of him, to Kjieran van Stone’s fiery sacrifice—until he’d suddenly awoken as the honored guest of a man he’d long blamed for the death of his sons…an enemy who appeared to be no enemy at all.
He hadn’t been long awake after recovering from weeks of feverish sleep when the Akkadian Prime Minister Rajiid bin Yemen al Basreh had come to see him.
Rajiid bin Yemen al Basreh…who wore a turban of dignity above his cloak of reserve. He was Morin d’Hain’s counterpart in the world of espionage, and every bit as formidable in his craft as Gydryn’s Spymaster. In all of the king’s speculations about who might’ve gone to such lengths to save his life, al Basreh’s was one name he had never even considered.
Sitting at his bedside on that momentous day, al Basreh had welcomed Gydryn and told him several stories. One tale described a line of knights, battle-weary and forlorn of their liege, yet making their determined way across enemy lands.
Al Basreh explained that his Akkadian scouts had observed these men but had left them alone, waiting to see where they would go and what they would do; and in time, the knights had found their way to the abandoned fortress of Nahavand.
Another tale spoke of companies of soldiers scrambling across the rocky mountains as scorpions in the night, yet who were not bred of the desert—Dannym’s men, his men. These soldiers made no venture to claim new territory, only made their way as rapidly and unobtrusively as possible to Nahavand. The Emir’s scouts had observed all of these migrations and many more and had allowed all to pass.
Hearing this, Gydryn knew the inner warmth of an impossible triumph, the feeling heightened by an uncommon sense of vindication. It had been a desperate gamble, sending his men into Akkad-held lands to escape the machinations of Radov abin Hadorin and Viernan hal’Jaitar, but Epiphany had granted his prayers and protected his troops by way of a benevolent monarch he’d had neither reason nor right to hope for.
When al Basreh had left the king that day, Gydryn’s heart had been full.
He had not seen the prime minister since.
In the following days…weeks, Healers had come regularly to ensure his improvement, and servants brought him more food than he could ever consume in pursuit of regaining his strength, but what Gydryn most desired were answers.
Even before the Akkadian Emir had gone to such extremes to save his life, Gydryn had known that Abdul-Basir was not his enemy, for Morin d’Hain’s letter on the Sea Eagle had implied it, and Kjieran van Stone had sworn it with his dying breath.
Oh, Kjieran…
Most stirring to his soul was the question of what had happened to Kjieran during his months in the temple of the Prophet Bethamin. If not for Kjieran’s missives—sent secretly and bravely under prodigious threat—Morin d’Hain would not have learned of Radov’s pact with Bethamin in time to warn Gydryn. And if not for Kjieran’s personal efforts, Gydryn would certainly have died amid the dunes of the Sand Sea, yet one more victim of Viernan hal’Jaitar’s perfidy.
Those final scalding hours with Kjieran had become indelibly seared into Gydryn’s memory, but they’d also left him with a torrent of questions—he’d watched an entire c
ompany of men disintegrate before his eyes while remaining himself untouched; then had come Kjieran striding over the dunes, with his blackened flesh and inhuman strength….
‘He sees what I see…’
The memory of those words, scrawled in blood across Kjieran’s wasted chest, still haunted Gydryn’s nights. And then to have watched the pitiful man immolate himself?
The king tightened his hands around the balcony railing. What horrors had Kjieran endured to drive him to such a desperate end? And yet throughout, he’d remained loyal. It broke Gydryn’s heart.
Trying to push these thoughts from his mind, for they only served to widen the fissure of grief rent in Kjieran’s name, Gydryn watched the turbaned laborers doing…well, he wasn’t sure what the men were doing up in the high fronds, save endangering their lives. Yet, he supposed that whether they wagered their lives in the palms or on the plains of battle, they faced the same peril. The price of a man’s life remained constant, no matter how he chose to risk it.
He’d taught his sons that a king must bear the weight of conscience on behalf of his men. He’d tried to teach them that a leader of men must assume the guilt of all, so that mere soldiers might follow orders with a clean conscience and their honor intact. He believed it earnestly and lived by it wholly, but in eight years of war…oh, such weight had he assumed! Not merely the deaths of honorable men but of his own beloved sons.
And yet…
One ghost of potential truth still plagued the king relentlessly. It had haunted his dreams during his feverish recovery and lingered still like a vagrant, making allies with the shadows in his room. Viernan hal’Jaitar had tried to manipulate him with it; Gydryn had battled his conscience over pursuing it; al Basreh had offered no information regarding it, yet if anyone would know the truth of this rumor, the Akkad’s prime minister had to. If only the man—
A knock came upon the door to his chambers. The king turned from the railing to see a turbaned servant enter, press his palms together and bow. “Peace be upon you, Your Majesty.”
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