Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Tanis wasn’t sure that he really understood what Sinárr was trying to describe to him, but he thought he grasped at least a glimmer of it.

  Sinárr extended his palm towards Tanis. “Will you give me your hand?”

  Only slightly hesitant now, for he understood much better of the Warlock than he had before, Tanis placed his hand in Sinárr’s. The Warlock stroked his ebony fingers down across Tanis’s palm, tracing it with his gilded nails. The lad no longer misinterpreted the man’s fascination with him as some misplaced desire; now he understood that he offered Sinárr a connection to the sensation he craved—a connection to elae.

  “I’ve never encountered an Adept like you, Tanis.” Sinárr looked up under his brows. “I’ve never had a concubine who wished to create with me, never come upon an Adept with such innate talent for it as you possess. I want this co-creation.” He exhaled a forceful breath and released Tanis’s hand. “As you’ve seen, I would do anything to gain it.”

  Turning away from the lad, he spread his hands on the railing, leaned his weight into his arms and gazed out across the valley and the stripe of mercuric sea. Both moons burned high and bright in a sky resplendent with stars. Tanis could tell the Warlock was holding himself in close check.

  After a moment, Sinárr exhaled a slow sigh, redolent of disappointment. “I thought you wanted to create worlds with me.” He cast Tanis a sidelong look. “At one point…it seemed to me that you did.”

  “I do.”

  “But you won’t consent to be bound to me?”

  “No.”

  Sinárr looked away from him, radiating frustration.

  In their nearness, Tanis felt that resonance building between them again, bringing with it a sense of connection that drew him to the Warlock as much as it magnetized Sinárr to him. Once, the feeling had frightened him. Later, it had confused him. Now he understood what was causing it.

  When he first realized his path was leading him to the Warlock, Tanis had no idea why or what he was meant to do—he’d been so focused on rejecting the idea of being bound to Sinárr that he’d missed several important truths. Now he saw them clearly.

  Tanis put a hand on the Warlock’s arm, amplifying their mutual attraction. “Sinárr.”

  The man looked desperately to him.

  Tanis met his gaze. There is another way.

  Thirty-five

  “In this world, there are givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.”

  –Yara, an old Kandori woman

  Rain slashed the night as Ean and Sheih ascended the winding stairs of a campanile. All the while he climbed, Ean thought about the pattern of cause and consequence. The more he thought on it, the more he saw the skill as something native to him, an ability long possessed but never before relied upon—never actually recognized.

  He recalled a time on his grandfather’s ship when he’d looked at a sailor stowing the loose end of a line and seen stormy seas and the mizzen mast breaking. Between broken mast and sailor lay a host of choices and actions. At the time, these images had flown past in his mind’s eye as a school of fish beneath the waves—the pattern of their arrangement glimpsed for but a breath and vanished. But two days later, their ship had hit a storm, and the mizzen snapped from stay lines incorrectly secured.

  Then, Ean had dismissed his earlier vision as a fluke of chance. Now he saw it as a talent that Arion had also possessed—

  No…a talent Arion had honed to a razor edge.

  Ean emerged from the stairwell into the campanile’s bell tower, overlooking a wide plaza. A brazen wind whipped through the tower’s vaulted stone arches, danced capriciously in the rafters and swept on, leaving a pool of rainwater beneath the massive iron bell.

  Ean moved through one of the open arches out into the rain and walked to the tower’s crenellated edge. Cloaked in the fifth, he stared down into the arcaded square, unaware of the lashing rain, only observing the rose-hued funnels of the first strand: lithe spirits reflecting life’s purest energy; their whirling cyclones joined earth to sky. Visible beyond these gossamer whirlwinds, the second strand spread its burnished copper sheen across the world. But Ean mostly watched the fourth strand’s shimmering tides, for this ephemeral yet powerful energy was the strand most offended by the eidola’s presence.

  And the fourth-strand currents were rippling.

  He crouched at the campanile’s edge and let the wind bludgeon and buffet him while the rain made a lake of the square far below. He hardly noticed the storm, but he did notice the way Sheih kept staring at him from the deeper protection of the bell room.

  Monitoring the currents required only a whisper of his attention, so he concentrated in the meanwhile on making sense of his newfound ability with what Arion had called ‘patterns of consequence.’

  They were only glimpses, yet each time, with each flashing moment, Ean had conceived the entire pattern—a falling domino effect of choices rushing forward into action, reaction, decision and new causation, resulting in a design of final consequence where the felled domino pieces represented the outcome of each individual choice. It seemed almost scientific to him; a logical path of choices and consequences that stippled its shape like raindrops on the desert sand, easily swept away by an unanticipated decision, and yet for that brief moment, entirely valid, as predictable as an equation’s mathematical result.

  As Ean in that moment walked the living path of this pattern, he traced along the spiral already predicted by those falling domino choices; each new decision led to one already anticipated—but only so long as no one made an unexpected choice.

  The rain ebbed, and Ean glanced up to see the clouds beginning to break. Sheih emerged from the bell room and came to stand behind him where he crouched at the tower’s edge. “Do they come?” Her voice was low, fervent. A viperous anticipation laced her tone.

  Ean straightened to his full height and looked down at her masked face. “Get ready.”

  Her slanted eyes narrowed. “I’m always ready.”

  The ripples that heralded the eidola’s coming had grown into waves, the distance between crests shortening, troughs deepening, the creatures’ arrival imminent. But Ean couldn’t see them anywhere.

  He stared out across the darkened plaza using both naked eyes and elae-enhanced vision, but no matter how he strained, his sight revealed only storm-washed arcades, shadows supporting shadows, and darkly glimmering pools making mirrors out of stone.

  Tension threaded Ean’s frame. Why couldn’t he see them? Where were they?

  He moved to the other side of the campanile and looked out over the Upper City. The rapidly clearing storm was now shedding intermittent moonlight on the patchwork of riads and the lush darkness of their sleeping gardens. The second strand’s currents showed him the lattice of city streets that the night concealed from his mortal eyes. Most of those passageways were empty, for the rain had driven all but the stoutest of humanity inside. Still…no eidola.

  Yet the fourth-strand currents were veritably writhing.

  Ean should’ve been able to see the eidola—instinct warned that they were nearly upon him—but somehow they remained hidden among the night’s drenched and languorous shadows. He could almost feel the creatures, like Arion had been able to feel the Mages hiding in the Citadel’s hall…

  A curse left Ean’s lips, barely formed. He should’ve seen it from the first! All this time he’d been assuming Dore had sent the eidola in pursuit of him…but what if Darshan had sent them?

  Darshan…who wielded deyjiin as the Enemy had wielded it on Tiern’aval—who may indeed have been the faceless force of enmity that had claimed Arion’s life. And now the clearing storm…

  The Prophet had awoken.

  And sent his eidola in night-cloaks of deyjiin.

  Ean growled a heated oath.

  Sheih stiffened at his side. “What is it?”

  He rushed to the tower’s edge, catching himself against the low crenels, his mind searching for id
eas while his eyes scanned the sleeping plaza. A gritty foreboding churned in his chest.

  How could he find them if they were cloaked in deyjiin? He didn’t know how to wield it; even Arion hadn’t been able to combat it. All Ean knew about it was that it was a consumptive power.

  So give it something else to consume.

  Ean threw together a working with a painter’s rapid, careless strokes. He lashed the patterns into a matrix, bound it with the fourth and was about to launch it when he remembered it wouldn’t stick to the eidola without the first strand added to its design. This he threw on as a pot of paint upended and then shot the pattern off on the arrow of his intent.

  His breath hung in his lungs while he watched the glimmering energies fly through the air, watched them impact and splash across the entire plaza in a diffuse shimmer…which rapidly vanished into a mass of deeper darkness oozing along the plaza’s north side, just steps from the tower’s base.

  Shade and darkness!

  He hastily formed Dareios’s pattern—a complicated matrix much more sophisticated than the rough sketch he’d tossed a moment ago. Meanwhile, the black mass reached the bottom of the tower.

  Behind him, Sheih hissed a curse. Steel scraped against stone.

  Ean spun. The matrix fell apart in his mind.

  Five eidola were climbing over the tower’s edge. A sixth was already pressing Sheih in a combat of swords, driving her towards the crenellated wall.

  Time seemed to hold its breath for the instant Ean deliberated, stricken to stillness by the sudden emergence of two paths clearly sailing forth from the same point of embarkation. There was the slightest chance that Darshan had sent his creatures on the hunt for someone who’d worked elae in his city and not for Ean specifically. But if he destroyed these eidola without using the matrix to do it…Darshan would recognize him. He would know him.

  Along one course, Ean saw himself abandoning Sheih to her own fate and securing his escape, living to test his patterns another day. Upon the other course, he fought these creatures long enough to test the matrix and in the doing announced himself to Darshan. It wasn’t a particularly palatable choice, but Ean recognized that he did have one.

  Sheih was furiously battling the one eidola and seemed to be holding her own, but now the other five creatures were coming for him, never mind the mass swarming below.

  Ean chose a path.

  He summoned the pattern he’d used in Ivarnen and threw it at the closest eidola. Two of them immediately collapsed into convulsions, but the other three split apart and darted for cover beneath the arches.

  Ean drew his sword and went after them, and—

  Barely got his weapon up in time to fend off a bolt of deyjiin. It sizzled along the skin of his arm, an icy tingle, sharp and stinging. Ean slung the bulk of the power off his blade and set his sights on the lucid, who had jumped up and was clinging to one of the arches.

  The lucid rattled a ratcheting cry and power flared, thunder without sound. Ean pushed intention into his fifth-strand shield and absorbed it in a backwards skid of water, but the campanile’s iron bell had no such protection. It emitted one ear-splitting toll as it flew off its rafters and crashed through the stone archway. Stone rained in its wake. It smashed through the tower’s crenellated edge and tumbled down into the plaza. Bats erupted behind this exodus with shrill cries, and a breath later, the tormented bell landed in a cacophonous clang of shattering bronze.

  Ean’s ears were still ringing when an eidola launched into him. They hit the broken archway together and tumbled across the littered tiles. Ean hugged the eidola close and used the contact to find the pattern binding it to life. With a thought, he unworked it.

  The creature stilled atop him.

  Deyjiin sizzled against his fifth-strand shield—another blast thrown from the lucid. Ean felt the cold power gnawing at his mind and fought back a reflexive revulsion. He shoved the creature’s dead weight off him and got to his feet.

  Hanging beneath the arch like some kind of mutated bat, the lucid rattled an eidola clatter and fired another bolt at him. Ean felt its effects against his shield as a torrent of stones thrown into the pond of his mind. He flung the Ivarnen pattern back at the lucid in aggravation. It hit the creature full in the face, and the lucid fell onto the shattered stones, already convulsing.

  Ean was running towards it with the intention of unworking it when another eidola launched itself out of the shadows. They tumbled together across broken stones and landed with the thing sprawled on top of him. Ean mashed his hand into its face and ripped the pattern of its existence into shreds. Then he shoved it irritably off. And good riddance.

  The lucid was still convulsing. Ean dared not spare any more time for it. He ran instead to the tower’s west wall, feeling urgency humming through him, and pitched to his knees at its base. Then he summoned once more the patterns of their matrix.

  The first strand formed the base and ensured the matrix would attach to the eidola; fourth-strand patterns disrupted their thoughts, the fifth strand eroded the link between monster and master; and the second strand would carry the working on the kinetic tides, scattering it as far as the wielder could power it.

  Ean focused the aim of his intent—

  A blast of thunder without sound struck his fifth-strand shields, knocking him sideways. He managed to release the pattern just as another blow struck him hard enough to make him lose his shields completely. He regained himself just as the lucid ran headlong into him.

  Ean caught the creature in his arms, and they both went over the edge.

  The lucid bit down at the joining of Ean’s neck and shoulder. Pain seared through him, but worse was the sensation of deyjiin flowing in, a very deadly sort of poison.

  Ean cast a desperate pattern towards the earth while simultaneously seeking the lucid’s life pattern; but the pattern binding the lucid to Darshan differed from those binding the other eidola, and it wasn’t so easily found. Complicating the problem, the icy magic pouring into his veins seared thought from his mind, making concentration all but impossible.

  The pain was so intense, and the remembered feeling of unmaking so close and horrifying—suddenly he was Arion looking into the face of the Enemy; he was his younger self staring into Rinokh’s yellow eyes; he was lost in the darkness of those twisted dreams of malevolent unmaking—

  Ean! Focus! Isabel’s voice pierced into his mind as sunlight piercing through a storm.

  He gulped an agonized gasp.

  Then they hit.

  The stone swallowed them.

  Hauling himself back to awareness on Isabel’s lifeline, Ean then swam through the lucid’s mind. Seconds were all he would have. If the creature resisted…but it was discomposed at finding itself deep inside the earth sinking through viscous rock. It drank stone into its open mouth and clawed desperately for the surface.

  Ean clung to it, riding it back towards the air while his mind swam more deeply in search of the pattern that bound it.

  There. A shimmering light amid the darkness of the eidola’s golem existence. Ean discerned the pattern’s beginning and ending and pulled—

  And opened the door into another’s awareness.

  Light—heat—power seared his consciousness. A forceful presence flooded his mind, blinding, overpowering, suffocating.

  Ean fled this awareness, but he might’ve been running from the sun in a vast desert. He couldn’t outrun it. He couldn’t escape it.

  EAN VAL LORIAN, the thought blazed in his skull, trembled his ears and hollowed his core, I RECOGNIZE YOUR MIND.

  The lucid finally clawed into the open air and clutched onto solid stone, as a sailor clinging to flotsam in a storm. Ean made a rope of the fifth and hauled himself away from the creature—and that terrible connection to its master.

  As he slid on his back across the plaza’s wet stones, he pulled a thread of the lucid’s life pattern along with him. The eidola’s head fell forward with a dull clack, half of its body still sunk in the
earth. Ean released the fifth and threw out his arms, and his body slowed to a halt.

  He gave a tremulous exhale.

  The puddle he was lying in quickly soaked through his clothing, but its ice was pleasurable after the heat of Darshan’s awareness. So deeply had the Malorin’athgul invaded Ean’s mind that it felt like the man was still there, haunting the recesses of his thoughts.

  Feeling a little sick, Ean slowly pushed up into a sitting position. His entire body was shaking. That contact with Darshan had been…indescribable. Oddly, not because of any malevolent intent, but because of the power Ean had perceived. The Malorin’athgul’s mind was a veritable star.

  Ean drew his knees to his chest, rested his elbows on them and pressed palms to his forehead. How had Isabel withstood him?

  Isabel.

  Ean closed his eyes and tried to calm his racing heart. He owed her his life just now. In his most desperate moment, she’d pierced all of his shields, focused him and forced him into action. She’d been there for him when he needed her, even though he’d turned his back on her when she’d most needed his compassion.

  Shade and darkness.

  But he didn’t dare think about Isabel just then, for Darshan knew he was in Tambarré. The Malorin’athgul could send a thousand more of those monsters to hunt Ean down, and they would care nothing for who they harmed in the process.

  Suddenly urgent to get moving again, Ean pushed shakily to his feet, but then his eyes seemed to notice what his much-abused mind had missed.

  Around the tower’s base lay a moat of unmoving eidola.

  The prince blinked, making sure he was actually seeing what his eyes claimed to observe. Then a bold laugh burst out of him. “It worked.” Ean heard the incredulity lacing his own words. They’d labored so long…it hardly seemed possible. And then, suddenly, he realized that it was.