“Oh, I saw.” Fury thrummed through Tanis in a way that felt powerful and true. “A moment ago, I saw something marvelous—miraculous, even. So much so it was nearly unbearable.” He pushed a hand through his hair, still feeling the vestiges of that experience, the haunting effects of the emotion that had accompanied it, and the pounding ache of its loss. “What I saw made me want that more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.” Tanis leveled the Warlock a severe gaze. “Now I only see hypocrisy clothed in human garb.”
Sinárr blinked at him.
Tanis looked away. “I don’t want to talk to you right now.” These were the words he said aloud, but he was thinking, I just need to be alone in my own space.
Whereupon he found himself back in his empty bed chamber, which was an illusion, and very much alone, which was not.
Twenty-four
“Any moral man will stand his ground for what he feels is right. It takes a better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.”
–Ramuhárikhamáth, Lord of the Heavens
Marius di L'Arlesé, High Lord of Agasan, Consort to the Empress of Agasan…father of a kidnapped heir…laid a hand on the red marble mantel and bowed his head. Across the long gallery, Valentina was receiving a briefing on the attack at the Sormitáge. Surrounding her stood a host of Sobra Scholars, several members of the Order of the Glass Sword, and commanders of both the Red Guard and the Imperial Adeptus and their aids.
Every word spoken in explanation of the events at the Quai game felt as a flail abrading Marius’s flesh. Every single thing that had occurred was a result of his failure to understand the currents. That such an attack could happen at all sat squarely on his shoulders, his grave misjudgment, his ineptitude.
Valentina sat unmoving in her chair, listening with her chin propped upon her fingers, occasionally lifting her head to ask a question but otherwise keeping her own counsel. The fourth formed a wall around her thoughts, but the flinty hue shading her gaze revealed much of her disposition.
For a time, Marius had stood behind the others, draped in the jagged shadows of self-abasement, silently enduring the reports and Valentina’s telling glances as a form of deserved torture. Then he’d stood by the windows and watched the sun setting in a stripe of flame between dual bands of darkness. He’d left the windows when they’d begun to reflect his own beleaguered stance.
So many days since the attack, and they were no closer to finding the truth…no closer to rescuing his daughter—no closer to knowing where to look for her! The node the Varangians had escaped across had been irreparably damaged. Pattern engineers from the Imperial Adeptus would have to rebuild its innate pattern from near nothing just to make it operable again. It gave them no clue to where the Danes and their Adept prisoners had traveled.
Marius had immediately ordered the Red Guard stationed in Kjvngherad to search King Ansgar’s every fortress and holding across Daneland, but while the reports from those units continued filtering in, so far their searches had discovered nothing…no stolen Adepts, no trace of his daughter.
The air in the gallery felt sharp in Marius’s lungs. Would that it might’ve brought the same sharpness to his thoughts. His mind was a whirlwind of spiraling facts he couldn’t connect. Elae’s currents coming out of Daneland carried an incomprehensible stain; they told him nothing. Without the currents to convey magical workings to him, he was blinded, even as Valentina remained blind without her Sight to guide her. And the true cause for either of these ill developments remained as clouded as his wits.
A little sleep could restore clarity.
But the Imperial Heir had been taken. To imagine his beautiful daughter in captivity, held at the mercy of their enemy…to imagine anything happening to Nadia…
Surely they knew the prize they held. They would use Nadia for leverage, a jewel to dangle before the imperial bargaining table. They would keep her safe, unharmed.
Yet if bargaining was their aim, why hadn’t he heard from them?
Them—them! Who was he even talking about when he used the term? The Danes? Or another faction, as yet unrevealed?
Marius clenched his fist against the mantel.
The love he bore for his daughter notwithstanding, he almost worried more for Tanis di Adonnai, who hadn’t the protection of an imperial birth, and whom Björn’s zanthyr had left in his charge while Phaedor was protecting the Empress on her trip to Köhentaal. The Empress had now returned, safe and unharmed, while Tanis…
That the lad had been captured while under Marius’s protection…by the Lady’s blessed light, there was just no way to reconcile it! He’d failed in his promise. It was unconscionable.
He dreaded to the very depths of his core the moment when the zanthyr would confront him on this truth—for surely the creature wouldn’t hesitate to drag him through the mud of his ineptitude. Pointing out Marius’s failings was one of Phaedor’s favorite entertainments.
Strangely, the creature had absented himself since Valentina’s ship had arrived back in port that day. Marius couldn’t decide if this was a kindness to him or an acute form of torture. He certainly didn’t need Phaedor’s derisive criticism to see the gravity of his own mistakes.
Oh, they’d gotten things in hand at the stadium eventually, but only after those marauding bastards had claimed upwards of two hundred Adepts for their Danegeld, due vengeance for the tithe the Empress had placed on Daneland’s Adepts.
And the monsters who’d been the invaders’ weapons of distraction…they were creatures out of legend, out of myth. And far too akin to the hapless Adept that had once laid bound in the Tower’s deepest dungeon, chained to a table while his body slowly petrified into enchanted stone.
—‘What would you have us do?’
‘Kill him—while you still can.’—
The zanthyr’s haunting warning still prickled Marius at inopportune times. That they’d heeded his caution—under great strain of effort, enough to make Marius wary of ever facing such a creature when conscious—offered ill comfort. It galled Marius immensely to do anything Phaedor suggested.
The High Lord exhaled a slow breath and tapped his fist against the mantel, trying to force a needle of clarity through the rough wool his brain had become. A question he’d asked himself a hundred times kept hounding his thoughts: how had King Ansgar orchestrated an invasion of such complexity when the Danes had no Adepts with the ability to work the necessary patterns?
After the last Varangian revolt, during which Ansgar’s king father had been slain, Valentina had placed a restrictive tithe upon the province. Nine out of ten Adepts born were to be sent to Faroqhar; only those in civil service would return.
Even Marius had felt this penance too severe and certain to cause friction when the young Ansgar came into power. And he was sure now that it had done that very thing. But the fact remained that Daneland had few Adepts. None were formally trained in the fighting arts; none had more than their first ring—certainly none possessed the skill to untwist a node and then corrupt its native pattern to cover their retreating tracks. Marius could only conclude that if the Danes were indeed behind this attack, they were not acting alone.
This was the needling suspicion that kept him so on edge. It was that other who stood behind the king, the one hiding in Ansgar’s shadow…he was the one Marius truly sought—and who was frustratingly eluding him at every turn!
Across the room, a low feminine voice sounded a pleasing murmur, though her words were far from comforting: Francesca da Molta, Commander of the Imperial Adeptus, was giving her report. Doubtless Francesca had foreseen this uprising, even as Marius had. She’d been responsible for quelling the last revolt. Her blade had claimed the king.
Marius laid an elbow on the mantel, sank his hand into his hair and let out a slow breath, allowing his tension to ease with the exhalation, summoning calm if not clarity. Too agitated to remain still for long, his feet soon found their natural motion across the rug again. He’d spent
much of that afternoon pacing along the outer edge of the assemblage surrounding his empress, but after Valentina had made a comment about his resembling a lion haunting the verge, he’d moved to the other end of the gallery to pace in relative privacy.
Nearby, a marble archway opened into a drawing room where his Caladrians waited upon his call. Would that he’d had a reason to summon them, some new clue for them to investigate.
Would that he had any idea where the Adepts had been taken!
Marius…
Valentina’s mental call drew his gaze in time to see a procession of departing personages coming towards him, all of them looking like harassed cats with flattened ears and diverted eyes—looking anywhere but into the face of his own disapprobation. Only Francesca, the Adeptus Commander, glanced his way in passing, her hazel-eyed gaze voluminous with apology.
Valentina reached him in their wake. She placed a hand on his arm and a lingering kiss upon his cheek.
Grateful to be alone with his wife at last, Marius drew her into his arms and exhaled a tremulous breath, rife with things unspoken. They’d not yet had their own time together, no opportunity to discuss what she’d found in Köhentaal, or his other investigations. But the most obvious needed no discussion: in her absence, he’d failed her. This truth was an arrowhead beneath his armor, with every breath working its inexorable way towards his heart.
“Do not blame yourself so, mio caro.” He felt the breath of her low words across his ear. “My Sight failed to foretell these events.”
Marius shook his head and clenched his jaw. “We are both of us blinded.”
She withdrew to look into his eyes. “Phaedor assures me it is intentional, this blinding. That it has a source, an enemy…a name.”
Marius misliked hearing such trust in her voice when speaking of the zanthyr, even though the zanthyr’s views agreed with his own—verily, he’d argued that same point endlessly with Valentina; but he found it beyond vexatious that because Phaedor said it, now she agreed. He feared the result of his wife having spent so many weeks with that creature. Too, she seemed improbably calm for a woman who’d just learned that her lands had been invaded and her heir taken hostage.
Then the truth dawned upon him, as with the painful glare of sunlight. “He told you something, didn’t he? Something that changed you? Some arcane knowledge that creature alone possesses?” He took her by both shoulders. “He knew all of this would happen?”
Valentina’s gaze tightened upon him. “You forget yourself, Marius.”
Marius dropped his arms and turned away. By Belloth’s unwholesome eye, that creature got under his skin like no one beneath the sun. When he should’ve been focused on the Empire’s wellbeing, all he saw was the red haze of jealousy. And Valentina…
Marius glanced back to her. She stood with her hands at her sides, watching him with the slightest arch of brow, a nuanced inquiry into his agitation, an admission that she was leaving him to the privacy of his own thoughts.
Utterly galling how badly the creature discomposed him. Phaedor wasn’t even in the room and he was driving a spear between Marius and his beloved. Verily, the Empire was poised on the brink of what might be the gravest threat they’d faced in three centuries, yet all Marius could think about suddenly was the need to bed his wife.
Valentina extended her hand with tolerance and her gaze with understanding. After a moment, Marius took the former and dropped his chin towards his chest. “My thoughts shame me, Valentina.” He hardly felt worthy of her forgiveness.
“You’re exhausted, Marius. The mind finds its own path in such moments.” She tugged on his hand, encouraging him back to her side.
Marius lifted his gaze, and for a moment, her beauty captured him—her dark waves bound loosely with diamond pins, the straight line of her shoulders, which seemed to bear the pressures of ruling an empire with grace and ease, the elegant curve of her collarbone, framed so alluringly by the wide neck of her damask gown…
As a girl of only sixteen she’d claimed him, heart and soul. He’d watched the years carve the youth from her features and limbs, even as they’d seemed to bring a brittleness to his own; but time’s passage through the Pattern of Life had only sculpted Valentina into exquisite shapes, her form forever pinned at the peak of womanhood. He’d never felt deserving of her, and certainly not now—
“So bleak, Marius.” She touched his face.
Marius’s gaze tightened upon her. “And you’re not?”
“I know your mind. You would rather my wrath thundered through the firmament, but I dare not give such emotion sway or we’ll all be lost.”
Marius frowned deeply at this.
Valentina searched his gaze for understanding. “The currents blind you, my Sight has abandoned me…should we now fixate our attention with the rigidity of anger, we should find our judgment so clouded as to lead us to ruin.”
Marius shook his head. Valentina had always ruled with her head more than her heart, even in regards to her children. “You never loved Nadia as I do.” Then he winced and turned his gaze away, his jaw tight. “I apologize. That was uncalled for.”
“But not untrue.” A flicker of a rueful smile hinted on her mouth. “She is your daughter and my heir. For that very reason, neither of us can afford to let emotion rule our heads.”
Marius felt too keenly the time apart from his wife. Usually they grounded each other, balanced each other’s weaknesses in important ways. The friction of the days spent without her had frayed his patience and fused the gears of his composure.
Valentina tugged on his hand to gain his attention.
When he looked back to her, she nodded towards the archway. “It appears we have one more person to consult.”
In the next room, Vincenzé and Giancarlo were on their feet and staring at a figure that was approaching across the marble floor, a dark personage wearing black leather and a cloak of shadows, the image of Night embodied.
Valentina nodded in welcome. “Phaedor.”
“Empress.” The zanthyr’s deep purr-growl elicited a visceral reaction in Marius. He had to force himself to keep his expression neutral.
The zanthyr shifted his emerald gaze to Marius, and there was dark amusement in it. “High Lord.”
Marius clenched his jaw and nodded to him.
And then another figure separated itself from the long shadow cast by the zanthyr. The lad was walking with his head turned backwards, looking over one shoulder. “Well, that was bloody unpleasant. Thanks so much for not vouching for me. I think the bastards forgot to search up my arse—”
He looked forward then, and noting suddenly the assembly of gazes fixed upon him, both tongue and feet came to a standstill.
Valentina arched a brow and gave the lad one of her more unsettling smiles, the kind she reserved for haughty princes. “Well, Felix di Sarcova…let’s talk about nodes, shall we?”
Twenty-five
“He wouldn’t know the feeling of truth in his hands if it took the form of his own cock.”
–The Adept truthreader Gannon Bair, on Dore Madden
Shailabanáchtran stepped out of Shadow into the Fortress of Tal’Afaq’s cavernous underbelly. Tumultuous currents at once buffeted him; violent waves, shouting a confused protest, the product of eidola in conversion. Nothing so outraged Mother Nature as her own patterns misapplied. Ironic that Balance wasn’t so easily offended.
While his portal winked closed behind him, Shail cast a summons and then stood for a time, basking in the chaotic currents.
He’d heard a story once, a drachwyr philosophy that declared that the divine naming of immortal creatures encapsulated their individual purpose for existence. The concept intrigued him.
Shailabanáchtran, Maker of Storms…
Yes, it suited him.
His brother Darshan viewed their purpose like a child trapped in a dark room; he stood within its shadowed confines, perceiving only the space occupied by the darkness, never bothering to search for a light much
less a door leading elsewhere. Pelas, for all his pathetic love affair with humanity, at least had never barricaded himself within Darshan’s ignorance.
Then there was Rinokh…poor Rinokh. Shail smirked at memories of his eldest brother. Rinokh had been so stultified by archaic ideas that he would only have been a nuisance. Ean val Lorian had rid Shail of Rinokh’s irritating presence far more effectively than he ever anticipated.
Three Malorin’athgul brothers…all of them so misguided, so naïve, so inept. Shail suffered none of their imperfections.
Lifting his head as if to embrace the sun’s warmth, Shail took a deep draw of elae at its most riotous. Furious waves washed across him, their crests choppy and sharp with the erratic reversal of opposing polarities. The patterns used to craft golems out of men forced purity to mate with the grotesque, causing a repulsion on the currents. That same repulsion was mirrored in the expressions of the living when they observed the dark product of that copulation.
Shail floated blissfully on these turbulent waters; they were echoes of Chaos, a microcosm of the energies that ransacked the Void. He never felt so alive as when among the riotous oscillations of violent unmaking.
He moved idly off towards the caverns where Dore was making monsters out of men. Halting at the edge, he cast his gaze across a wasteland of death and spoke to the doomed upon the currents. We have purified you of the light. Now you shall be reborn of darkness.
Near where he was standing, smoke appeared and coalesced into form. Violet-black eyes, like a raven’s iridescent wing, glinted in a visage of shifting planes. A hand solidified out of the dark mist. Then more of the figure—tall, broad of shoulder, trailing wings of smoke.
“Ah, Vleydis,” Shail nodded to the Warlock. “Thank you for coming. I thought you’d like to see this,” and he motioned to the eidola in making.
The Warlock shifted his glittering gaze to assess the dying forms. “It is as you said it would be.” His eyes and deep voice both held a hypnotic quality. In their time, they’d captured many a man’s will as viscerally as a horn rallying soldiers to battle. “Though I still do not see the need for these precautions. Eidola are easy to craft.”
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