Pelas moved gingerly to hands and knees. Then, more slowly, he found his feet and straightened. “Shail overtook me.”
The Warlock turned to him with a look of dazed wonder. “I’m not sure which is worse—letting your brother coincide your starpoints, or admitting to it.”
“The first, believe me.”
Rafael gave a low chuckle. “It’s considered the greatest of all blunders for a reason, Pelasommáyurek. Did you learn nothing from me during our time together?”
Pelas offered a rueful smile. “Enough to get me in trouble, it would appear.”
“You would’ve been in difficulty indeed if I hadn’t been receptive to your calling.”
Pelas smiled meaningfully. “Whenever have you not been receptive to my calling?”
A dark sparkle glinted in the Warlock’s eyes. “A fair question. Let’s leave this plane, shall we?” His wings trembled, and stars shed from their tips. Pelas got the sudden sensation of flying, but only because of the trailing waterfall of stars that spiraled now in a wake behind them.
Starpoints shifted. Space shifted. Shail’s plane and its hungering golems vanished.
Pelas stood in a vast chamber of black glass. Stars slowly turned beyond a row of tall obsidian arches, themselves nearly invisible against the background of space. Pelas looked up and saw a nebula staining the glass ceiling a violet-red. “This is new.”
Rafael walked across the obsidian floor and up the adjoining wall to a table. He looked over to Pelas as he poured a mercuric liquid into a goblet—an odd thing to witness, watching the stuff flowing sideways—and offered an alluring smile. “One can only do so much in a gravity-based world.”
Suddenly Pelas was standing beside him at the table, facing an identical wall of arches. He turned a look back over his shoulder, trying to reorient himself.
Rafael smiled at his expression. “For an immortal child of Chaos, you’re oddly fussy about spatial orientation.” He extended the goblet to Pelas.
Who gratefully accepted, remarking, “Chaos is no more like Shadow than Shadow is like the Realms of Light, Rafael.”
Rafael’s dark eyes smoldered. “Shadow is anything I want it to be.”
Pelas saluted that truth with his goblet and then downed its contents. The glowing fluid had no taste, but it felt cool in his throat and much restored his vitality. Rafael had unique ways of condensing deyjiin.
Quickly feeling more himself again, Pelas cast his awareness outward to find and mimic Rafael’s starpoints—not to claim the space but to share it, so he might work deyjiin equally. He noted the indistinct glimmer of furniture on the distant ceiling—wall? floor?—and murmured, “It seems like a world of your creation should follow your dictates, gravity or no gravity, as you choose.”
Rafael sipped from his own goblet and contemplated the tumultuous nebula in front of them. “Theoretically, but once gravity enters the equation, energy tends to want to follow its own laws.” Sparks flared through the black flames of his hair, embers glowing and extinguishing. “Fighting against these natural affinities becomes tedious.”
Pelas looked to him with unbridled appreciation. He and Rafael had long shared a kindred love for the ingenious and unique; under other circumstances, he might’ve dallied with him indefinitely. “My gratitude knows no bounds, my friend.”
The Warlock received this with an amused look. “Likewise your naivety in regards to your brother, it would appear.”
Pelas arched a resigned brow. “You needn’t rub it in, Rafael.”
The Warlock chuckled. “I haven’t begun rubbing it in, Pelas.” He looked him up and down with those darkly sparkling eyes, ever hinting of potent and dangerous possibility. “But I will, very soon.”
Pelas shook his head. “I can’t stay. My brother has something of mine I must retrieve.” And he knew exactly where to go to find Nadia. Shail had his own demons of predictability to wrestle with.
Rafael arched a skeptical brow. “You can’t even keep your starpoints stable. You think somehow you’ll successfully command a portal?”
Pelas handed him back his goblet with a smile. “I’ll even let you watch.”
Thirty-four
“If you have to choose between two evils, I say pick the one you’ve never tried before.”
–The Nodefinder Felix di Sarcova
Tanis dreamed.
He stood on the terrace of Pelas’s mansion as the sun was sinking low in the west, its nightly abdication giving birth to that magical time when the very air seemed golden and soft. Tanis felt a little calmer just finding himself in Hallovia, in seeing something he knew to be real. And then—
“Tanis?”
The lad spun. Pelas stood on the far end of the terrace.
Even more powerful than seeing his bond-brother was the feeling of their binding in full force. A wave of relief washed over the lad and he rushed to embrace him. Only then did Tanis realize how desperately he’d been missing him. “What happened to you? Are you safe? Is Nadia safe?”
“I’m fine,” Pelas said as he held Tanis, though he spoke the words with an odd sort of hesitation. “I will protect Nadia. Tell me what’s become of you. Sinárr hasn’t—”
“No.” Tanis dropped his arms and exhaled an explosive breath. “He hasn’t bound me.” Then he frowned up at him. “How can I have reached you?”
“I don’t know.” Pelas cast an assessing gaze around the terrace, as if searching for proof of some artifice in its crafting. “Sinárr must be facilitating our conversation. I can’t reach you in his universe without him willing it—believe me, I’ve tried.”
Tanis felt perplexed all over again. “But why would he help us communicate? He knows I only want…ugh.” He pushed palms to his forehead and then scrubbed his hands back through his hair. “By all the gods in the known, he’s so bloody confusing.”
Pelas’s gaze narrowed. He drew the lad towards a low stone wall and sat him down. “Tell me everything.”
Tanis tumbled through a rushed explanation of what had happened since they’d been torn apart. While he listened, Pelas drew one knee to his chest, hooked his arms around it and frowned deeply.
“Then Sinárr said something I really don’t understand.” Tanis pushed his hands against his knees and looked up under his brows. “He said Alorin was formed of deyjiin and elae in perfect balance, but I thought deyjiin was a consumptive power and antithetical to our realm.”
“No…I think he might be right.”
“How is that possible?”
The powerful intensity of Pelas’s gaze made it seem as if he was deconstructing the cosmos just so he might answer Tanis’s question. After a moment of this, he shifted his eyes back to the lad. “Yes, it makes sense…my brothers and I wouldn’t be able to work a power that didn’t already exist in the realm—we certainly can’t draw it from Chaos. That’s an essential reason that your mother and uncle have done what they’ve done—because they know we can’t access the full source of our power while within Alorin’s aether. All we have access to is what is already extant in the realm.”
While Tanis was pondering this, Pelas rubbed his jaw and continued thoughtfully, “Yes…I see better what Sinárr means. Deyjiin is consumptive when wielded in Alorin because the two forces coexist in a delicate balance; elae’s positive to deyjiin’s negative.”
Tanis frowned. “It seems like you just contradicted yourself.”
Pelas looked back to him. “No, it perfectly follows.” He flashed the lad a smile. “If the two forces are in a delicate balance, then wielding deyjiin over and above Alorin’s natural equilibrium—that is, forcing deyjiin out of its natural currents—unbalances the negative and positive forces. Deyjiin becomes destructive.”
Suddenly he leaned towards Tanis. “Do you see? It’s actually no different from what occurs when a wielder works elae. Forcing either of the powers out of their natural course alters the balance of the two energies—and affects the Cosmic Balance to a greater or lesser degree—that’s it
.” He snapped his fingers, and the light of understanding danced in his eyes.
Tanis could sense the wheels of his intelligent mind turning rapidly, making connections that lay far beyond his own understanding.
“Tanis…” Pelas cast him a keen look, “it’s entirely possible that the wielding of elae affects the Cosmic Balance only when certain workings destabilize the negative-positive ratio of elae and deyjiin.” His lips curled in a sly smile, and he leaned back on both hands, his gaze sparkling as if with a delicious secret. “I wonder how long the Sobra Scholars have been laboring over that conundrum, eh, little spy? I know one or two who would pay dearly to hear the explanation we’ve just deduced.”
Tanis didn’t care so much in that moment that they’d just solved a debate that had been raging for millennia; the solution didn’t show him the way out of Shadow. The lad sighed dejectedly. “Then Sinárr was telling the truth.” Somehow this came as disheartening news. “You need both powers to build a realm, just as he said.”
Pelas arched a brow. “Sinárr wants to build a realm?”
Tanis glowered. “Yes. With me.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?”
Tanis frowned in response to his grin. “You know, you’re really not helping.”
Pelas placed a hand on the lad’s knee and squeezed gently. “How can I help you?”
Tanis slumped his shoulders, feeling disheartened again. “The trouble is, I don’t think you can. I think I have to figure my own way free of here.”
And that was the crux of the matter, Raine’s truth.
“Tanis…” Pelas leaned to capture his eye, “if it can be solved, you will find a way.”
Tanis exhaled a slow breath and lifted a troubled gaze to him. “And if I can’t?”
Pelas looked him in the eye, so that there could be no mistaking his intent. “Then I will tear Shadow apart, world by world, to find you.”
The windows of his bedchamber were dark when Tanis woke from his dream, which at least answered the question of whether Sinárr’s world saw regular days and nights. Tanis lay in bed for a time feeling stormy. His thoughts whirled like snowflakes, battering him with icy frustration.
Tanis interlaced his fingers behind his head and lay for a time with his elbows pointing towards the ceiling, wishing he could frame his thoughts between those two bony points as easily as Sinárr framed space.
The problem was, he didn’t know where to start piecing this picture together. He couldn’t connect what he knew with what he didn’t understand; he couldn’t put the information into any sort of framework that made sense; and he couldn’t differentiate between what information was important and what wasn’t, so it all merged into one huge snowstorm of confusion.
Everything Sinárr and Mérethe had told him kept running through his head, each conversation carrying equal weight with the others, so that nothing really stood out as the important piece to begin with in assembling the puzzle.
‘Shadow has no form except what the Warlocks give to it.’
‘I knew the moment I saw you that our opposing natures would call to each other.’
‘Warlocks cannot tear the binding fabric between the realms…’
‘He will make you forget what is real.’
‘Most Adepts cannot survive in Shadow for more than a day or two…’
‘I like your world.’
‘You must agree to be bound.’
‘With Mérethe…I felt something similar, though far less strongly so.’
‘We create space by first creating a point to view.’
That’s exactly what Tanis needed—a little space in which to frame some perspective.
He threw his hands to his sides and stared at the ceiling, which was dimly illuminated by the wavering light of a candle. He felt like that tiny flame, a single source of elae sputtering amid the vast void of Shadow.
No…that can’t be right.
Now more than ever, Tanis felt that he had to have been correct in his initial assertion: if deyjiin roamed Alorin, then elae had to roam Shadow.
But Mérethe said most Adepts couldn’t survive there, even bound to a Warlock, which meant that whatever form elae took in Shadow, it was not enough to sustain most Adepts. Yet it was sustaining him.
Or was it?
Tanis draped an arm over his head and gazed up at the ceiling again. Why were he and Mérethe the exceptions? Or rather, what similarity put them together in one category and other Adepts in another?
In a moment he had it, or thought he might.
‘No strand is so wildly variant as the third…’ His mother had told him this. But could it really be that simple?
Maybe simple is what he’d been missing. Maybe in expecting the answer to be complex, he’d missed the underlying, fundamental truth.
He recalled his father writing about the Ninth Esoteric—Pure concept always overwhelms linear translation. Arion wrote that the Esoteric had many interpretations, but its most basic meaning was that for anything to be fully grasped, it must be reduced to its simplest form.
Complexity meant impurity in logic as well as in Patterning, at least according to Arion. In his investigations of magical phenomena, Arion would strip down all the data to its most basic facts, while at the same time disregarding all assumptions, no matter how ‘agreed-upon’ those assumptions were. He believed this was a vital step in any study of unexplained phenomena.
The most basic truths then, once found, would prove workable in both deductive and inductive reasoning—they would explain existing phenomena as well as predict phenomena. This was one of many reasons that Arion believed a student should never be taught how to wield a pattern; instead, he should be given the pattern and allowed to extrapolate its uses on his own.
So, if Tanis used the one simplicity he’d landed upon…well, it certainly opened up a whole new realm of possibility. It might even predict phenomena, as his father had claimed.
But to be able to work with his idea, he needed more information.
Tanis threw off his covers and started hunting around for his clothes, determined to speak to Sinárr immediately—
Whereupon he found himself standing on a tower roof in the middle of a winter storm. Braziers burning atop the crenels illuminated the swirling snow.
Sinárr stood on the far side of the flat roof, staring off into the night. Snow clung to his dark cloak and hood and had accumulated in drifts at his feet. Tanis wondered why the Warlock hadn’t made the storm avoid the tower the way the rain had miraculously avoided their ship.
Tanis hugged his arms and trudged through the drifts towards Sinárr. The icy wind cut through his linen garments as if he wore nothing, and he was chilled to the bone before he’d even made it halfway across the tower. He wondered why Sinárr had brought him there without a coat. Perhaps it was a sort of punishment for their last conversation, when Tanis had spoken so brusquely to him.
He was shivering by the time he reached the Warlock. Every exhale puffed frost into the night, only to be stolen away by the stinging wind. Tanis hugged his chest and stomped his feet in a futile effort to maintain some circulation.
“I think we should t-talk,” the lad stammered. His face was already so cold it was hard to make his lips form words.
The Warlock turned his head sharply, as if Tanis had startled him, and took the lad’s measure in a single sweep of his golden eyes. “Perhaps I’m uneducated in your traditions, Tanis…but this seems an odd choice of garments for a snowstorm.”
Tanis clutched his arms tighter around his chest and stomped his feet some more. “You didn’t give me a c-coat.”
“You asked me not to pick your clothing for you.”
“I asked you to let me ch-choose, not to make me f-freeze for w-want of it.”
Sinárr looked him up and down with one raised eyebrow. Then he lifted his gaze to the storm and observed thoughtfully, “I expected you would make for yourself what you required.”
Tanis started bouncing in place. He
could feel neither his fingers nor his feet and wished Sinárr would quit punishing him and take them someplace else. “Why w-would you expect that?”
Sinárr looked back to him. “Because this is your storm.”
Tanis stilled. “My storm? But I—one minute I w-was in my rooms, the n-next I was here!”
“You asked me to let you shape my world.”
“When I knew I was d-doing it! N-not j-just any t-time—oh for Epiphany’s s-sake!” Tanis gritted his chattering teeth and shouted the thought, Just please take me somewhere warm!
Daylight blinded him.
Tanis threw an icy arm across his eyes.
The heat from the blazing day felt a furnace against his chilled flesh, yet the warmth was a welcome balm. In the short time it took his eyes to adjust to the sere daylight, the snow in his hair had melted and was dripping into his eyes.
Tanis shook out his wet head and blinked into a glaringly bright afternoon. The sun was veritably baking the high plateau where he stood. Around and below, as far as he could see, spread the ochre-hued walls of an immense canyon.
He walked to a marble railing and peered over—easily a thousand feet down to the canyon floor. Then he turned behind him and saw the towers and spires of an immense palace rising out of the rock.
Looking around, Tanis saw Sinárr sitting at a round table in the shade of a gazebo, so he walked to join him. The temperature dropped at least ten degrees just moving from the sunlight into the shade.
Sitting in an elegant wingback armchair, the Warlock wore a royal blue silk shirt with the cuffs turned back, the fabric bright against his very black skin. He was resting an elbow on the arm of his chair and running a finger along his lower lip, observing Tanis with a quiet intensity in his golden gaze—though the lad felt more like Sinárr was absorbing him than observing him.
Tanis paused beside his own chair and eyed Sinárr uncertainly. He still suspected the man was subtly punishing him for becoming so angry during their last conversation.
Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4) Page 48