The Sormitáge has scholars dedicated to such studies, my lord.
Darshan’s gaze at his reflection tightened slightly. The Sormitáge…
Where his brothers had dedicated so much of their time in this realm to their own individual, disparate pursuits. There was a definite irony to be acknowledged here.
Yet…once he aligned his thoughts towards the idea, he felt a sort of inclination, almost a tugging—or perhaps a slight yearning? It was hard to decipher the exact feeling—drawing him westward.
Certainly he needed to better understand the Adept Returning. Even had he any idea how to release Kjieran from his thrall, he wouldn’t leave such a thing to chance. Kjieran’s body was already deceased. Darshan was obviously holding his spirit on that plane—but why? How?
Yes, a trip to Agasan’s famed Sacred City was definitely in order.
Darshan turned from the mirror and faced his acolytes. In his mind, he found the threads of binding that subsumed their determinism to his own. He placed a hand on each of their shoulders while placing a mental knife to those binding strings. “I release you from your oaths to me.”
They must’ve felt it, the quivering snap of those threads parting, but he couldn’t tell if their shocked expressions were a result of his working or his words.
“My lord!” They both gasped and fell to their knees before him.
Darshan saw tears trailing down their cheeks. From the sense of hope that suddenly flooded the currents, he assumed with a dry resignation that they were tears of joy.
He wasn’t sure what possessed him then—certainly the idea had never occurred to him before that moment—but he took hold of each of the hundreds of strings within his harp of compulsion, myriad threads of binding to Marquiin scattered around the realm, and with a razor-edged thought, severed every one.
The rain suddenly ceased against the temple roof.
His acolytes stared open-mouthed at him.
What had they experienced? What had they perceived? Surely the currents had carried something of what he’d just done.
He hooked a finger beneath each of their chins and encouraged them to their feet. “Let it be known forthwith: Nothing of the Prophet remains to serve here. I do not know if I will ever return.”
Then he spun away from their shocked expressions, and strode out beneath a clearing sky to determine what he could see of the world without the veil of his own expectations.
Fifty-seven
“Not taking life too seriously is the surest way to get out of it alive.”
–The pirate truthreader Hadrian of Jamaii
Ean caught deyjiin on his blade and winced. The toxic power sizzled through his fourth-strand mental shield, injected acid into his thoughts and corroded the intent he’d just summoned. He quickly wrapped the fifth around the expanding power and cast it from his mind; his grunted exhale carried the noxious taste of sulfur.
Of course, the latter could’ve been a result of the volcano belching smoke into the otherwise clear sky a dozen miles from where he and Pelas were sparring. The Palma Lai archipelago played host to many active volcanoes, the fiery jewels of its lengthy chain. All around them, dark peaks scraped the ocean horizon, alternately oozing fire or fumes.
The islands apparently had far more patience for the earth’s dyspeptic flatulence than Ean could muster, especially with deyjiin constantly crackling in his brain, but Pelas’s choice of a battlefield was purposeful. Palma Lai was one of the few places in the realm where they could work their powers indiscriminately and not call attention to themselves on the currents. And gaining the attention of one of Pelas’s brothers was the last thing either of them wanted.
The tropical sun was bearing down with unrelenting intensity, baking Ean’s bare chest and arms along with the dark rock beneath his feet. They sparred on the high plateau of an old lava flow, which thrust a shriveled and barren arm across the lush island. After a morning of battling deyjiin, Ean was beginning to feel like his mind resembled that blackened swath rather too closely.
Pelas swept his foot through the dark earth and spat dust from his mouth. “If you let it touch your thoughts, Ean, that’s going to happen.”
You don’t say. Ean tried to clear his mind of deyjiin’s lingering tingle. He was attempting to find an ability within himself to compel the power the way Björn could, or at least a better means of controlling and channeling it, but thus far, deyjiin seemed to be doing most of the controlling. “Let’s do it again.”
Pelas grinned predatorily at him. “Your wish is my command, Prince of Dannym.” He pushed deyjiin into another pattern and cast it forth with the flick of a thought.
Ean cast his own intent into a spear and ripped the pattern apart just before it hit his shields. The detritus of the exploded pattern bombarded his mind with spiny needles of pain.
The prince pushed a palm to his forehead and hissed a frustrated oath.
Also stripped to the waist beneath the punishing sun, Pelas shoved hands on his hips, just above the waistline of his pants, and looked up at Ean under his brows. Strands of his long hair clung damply to his skin. Both of them wore a sheen of sweat. “I thought you wanted to find a way to combat deyjiin other than unworking it?”
Ean glowered at him. “The pattern came too quickly at me.”
“Or you think too slowly.” Pelas aimed a knowing grin at him. “You did ask me to make this realistic—”
“I know what I said.” Ean paced a tight circle. He could see the pattern of causation branching forth from this learning. He knew he was on the right course, but despite his efforts, he didn’t seem to be making any headway upon that path. The distant spirals of consequence stayed just as indistinct, no matter what he did.
Pelas retied his long hair into a messy knot behind his head, observing the while, “We’ve tried this your way all morning, Ean. Perhaps we should try it my way for a time?”
His way—an intimate sharing of minds. Ean dragged his fingers through sweat-dampened hair and lifted his head to stare between his elbows up at the sky. A long trail of fulminous smoke led back to the nearest volcano and its cauldron of liquid fire. That belching hole seemed more inviting to him than the inside of Pelas’s head.
“Fine.” Ean dropped his arms to his sides and a sooty contemplation towards the Malorin’athgul. “Let’s try it your way.”
Pelas grinned. “I’ll try to make it as painless as possible.”
“Just make it fruitful.”
Pelas approached him bare-footed across the black and blistered earth, assessing Ean with a shrewd glint in his copper eyes. “It will be a new experience at least, this sharing of each other’s minds.”
“Seems to me you have a few too many others sharing that space already.”
Pelas chuckled. “You have no idea, Prince of Dannym.” He extended his hand and clasped wrists with Ean. “A light bond, temporary,” Pelas met his gaze intently, “central between us; a common space for the sharing of thought. Would you like to do the working?”
Ean had already claimed elae’s fourth strand to do so.
Pelas opened his mind to the prince, and light unfolded like a sudden, blinding break in the clouds. Ean molded the fourth into a field beneath that blazing light, forging a central space, neutral ground where each might place ideas for the other to inspect. Then he retreated to the shady solitude of his own mind.
Pelas crossed his arms and considered Ean while they each explored the mental space newly created between them.
Ean had no idea what his mind seemed like to Pelas, but the Malorin’athgul’s felt as slick as an oiled blade, and surprisingly…benign, so different from Darshan’s razor intent. He sensed deyjiin’s presence within Pelas’s constitution, but the Malorin’athgul was keeping the power contained behind the immutable wall of his own consciousness.
“So…” Pelas looked the prince up and down with a taunting smile, “shall we try it with blades?”
Ean blinked against the sun as he spun and caught P
elas’s bolt of deyjiin on his sword. The sentient weapon sang, his muscles tensed, and cold power sizzled against his shields. The prince wrapped the fifth around deyjiin and slung it off to his right. The black earth behind him shivered into an ashen blight several feet in diameter. The landscape now sported a rash of such craters.
Pelas skipped forward with his weapon swinging. Ean raised his in both hands to block it. Their Merdanti blades clashed in a rapid staccato that echoed back from the scree slope behind them. Elae sang in Ean’s mind. Deyjiin hissed against his shields. Sparks fanned in shimmering, deadly tails.
Pelas spun out of contact and threw a web of deyjiin in the wake of his departure. Ean pierced it with a hooked spear and flung it away. He advanced into Pelas’s guard, thrusting low. The Malorin’athgul slammed his blade down across Ean’s and aimed an elbow for his jaw. Ean veered back, and Pelas sent his sword scraping narrowly past Ean’s ribs. Ean parried and struck anew. Pelas blocked him, their blades clashing beneath his flashing smile.
Instinct told Ean that the solution to battling deyjiin resided in the Ninth Law—Do not counter force with force; channel it—but he hadn’t yet landed on the exact form of that solution. Sharing the space of Pelas’s mind was helping him understand how the Malorin’athgul was shaping his power to his intent. Pairing this with a view of the currents, Ean was staying half a breath ahead of him—most of the time.
The Malorin’athgul threw another deyjiin net. Ean dodged left while slinging a pattern of containment back at Pelas. It caught his leg as he was turning and nearly trapped him, but Pelas dove with the momentum and somersaulted back to his feet. As he was rising he fired a third sizzling web off his blade.
Ean made a rope of the fifth and yanked himself out of harm’s way just before the web closed around him. It sizzled instead into the rocky earth where he’d been standing, leaving a man-sized, ashen crosshatching.
Heart racing, Ean held his blade low and paced a slow circle in time with the Malorin’athgul, reflecting that there was nothing quite like a series of narrow escapes to remind you that you were alive. He cast Pelas a sharp smile. “I thought I asked you not to make it easy for me.”
Pelas tossed his hair from his eyes and wryly watched Ean circling him. “Just having some fun.”
Ean grunted. No, it wasn’t fun fighting Pelas. It was thrilling.
And so it went, the two of them battling in concert, seeking solutions for Ean to combat deyjiin. The sun observed their dueling as it trekked across the firmament. At times, its heat helped combat deyjiin’s numbing effects, but at others it dragged at Ean’s thoughts and weighted his limbs. Always when Ean was slow to respond, Pelas stung him for it—but this only motivated him the more.
Above all else, their sparring heightened Ean’s appreciation for Arion’s skill. What discipline he’d exhibited in his fight with Shail at the Citadel! To combat first the Mages, then the Paladin Knights and then Shailabanáchtran? To summon, compel and repel so much force for such a lengthy span of hours? Ean could barely conceive of how difficult it had been, and he’d lived through Arion’s memory of it.
Ean dragged his damp hair out of his face and walked a short line away from Pelas. His head felt like a much-abused pin cushion, and the ache in his limbs encouraged little beyond utter stillness, but the cortata kept him fuelled, and the understanding he’d gained of deyjiin had him mentally exhilarated.
Ean turned to face Pelas and waved absently with his sword. “I feel like we need to up the ante.”
Pelas grinned wonderingly at him. “Because…?”
Because Shail would’ve thrown everything he had at Ean. Because nothing short of a near death escape would give him any sense of future success. The prince opened palms to the sky. “I’m still standing, aren’t I?”
Pelas eyed him in amusement while the wind blew the dampness out of his long hair. “Come then.” He motioned for Ean to ready himself.
Still wearing an I-hope-you-know-what-you’re-doing look, Pelas began a pounding advance of overhead blows. Beneath this he a new working of deyjiin. It hit Ean’s fifth-strand shields like a lightning bolt and sent him skidding backwards through the raw earth, raising a voluminous cloud of ash. In the same breath, Pelas summoned a wall of deyjiin behind Ean, forcing him into a sideways dance. Then three more walls rose at right angles to the first, bringing Ean up short within a box of dancing, deadly light.
Ean stood, breathing hard, and assessed the walls’ construction via their shared mental space. This was the first time he’d been able to study an extant working of deyjiin—usually the power simply blasted him and dispersed. This time he saw how Pelas was forming the barriers but…
“There are no patterns binding the energy to form.” He shifted his gaze to focus on Pelas through the wavering energy. “Is that because the working is innate to you, or because of some other reason?”
Pelas approached the wall. “I’ve never thought to ask that question. When I made the walls just now, I simply willed them to form.”
“That doesn’t tell us much.” Ean crossed his arms and mentally studied the energy. “Adepts think in the patterns that are innate to them—the patterns are formed automatically by the process of their thoughts.”
Pelas considered him curiously. “What are you thinking, Ean?”
“I don’t know. There’s just something about it…” Ean narrowed his gaze contemplatively, whereupon both gaze and his thoughts sharpened to a point. He focused fast back on Pelas. “Do you ever use deyjiin in a pattern?”
“No patterns that are native to these realms.”
“Because deyjiin would consume elae, right?” He snapped his fingers. “That’s the thing. I’ve been going about this the wrong way, trying to find some pattern that would allow me to channel deyjiin. But yours is a consumptive power…” He stared purposefully at a bemused Pelas while fashioning a new intent—a new pattern hastily fashioned, broad stokes of the fifth across a three-dimensional canvas. Then he released it.
The walls became a sizzling veil of sparks and evaporated.
Pelas arched brows. “How—” he studied Ean’s working in their shared mental space. “How did you do that?”
“It’s the Ninth Law.” Grinning, Ean approached him. “See, I’ve been trying to find a way to rechannel deyjiin using a pattern, but deyjiin doesn’t create, it consumes. It’s interesting to watch. I’ve observed that once you’ve released the power, it becomes solid in the shape of your intent. It becomes your intent and that intent is immutable. Conversely, elae is always in motion; it can always be rechanneled.
“It occurred to me that I had to stop trying to force deyjiin to take a new shape—a new intention, because it won’t. It was like trying to push square blocks through a round hole. I have to let deyjiin maintain its current shape but give it something else to consume.”
Pelas eyed him keenly. “Another pattern.”
“Yes, I used the fifth for this one. The shape of your intent required deyjiin to consume my life pattern, but my hypothesis is that any pattern of similar complexity will do.”
“Impressive, Ean.” Pelas cast him a dangerous smile. “Let’s see how far your theory goes, shall we?”
Over the next few hours, Ean used every trick available to him from Arion’s arsenal, and with his newfound understanding of deyjiin, he even succeeded in marking Pelas twice—thin stripes of blood as his winning ribbons—but these were not nearly so rewarding as the Malorin’athgul’s conceding grin.
True to Ean’s earlier request, Pelas kept finding new and ingenious ways of challenging the prince’s ability. Ean had just rolled out from beneath another of those deadly nets when Pelas spun deyjiin into a spiral, which he flung at Ean.
The prince caught the first part of the corkscrew on his blade, but the force of its impelling slung him around, so that he only narrowly avoided Pelas’s descending sword. Ean used the fifth to stabilize his footing and adjusted his shields to dissolve deyjiin’s corkscrew. But instead of di
ssipating against his mental shield, as he’d expected, the spinning point bored through it. Deyjiin speared into his mind. And on the heels of this, as a line threaded to that spiral hook—compulsion.
This wasn’t the Labyrinth or even one of Dore’s matrices—it was the formless, innate compulsion of a Malorin’athgul, and once it clamped its jaws, it became impossible to shake off.
Ean perceived immediately that Pelas’s compulsion was as individual from Darshan or Shail’s as Pelas was himself individual from his brothers; thus, the pattern Ean had derived to protect himself from Darshan’s compulsion would be useless against Pelas.
Ean felt the compulsion expanding through his thoughts, needle tendrils as clinging vines, with each new hold casting forth additional branches, ever multiplying. He couldn’t contain it fast enough—
An idea came to him. Outrageous, foolhardy. His favorite kind.
Ean hastily portioned off the part of his mind not yet overcome by the compulsion. Eventually those vines would penetrate the walls he’d erected, but he gained a few moments of clarity. Ean used the small, free portion of his mind to gain a view of the trapped side of his mind—in effect, he was attempting to see the entire compulsion that was trapping him. Then Ean summoned the lifeforce into that tiny free portion of his mind.
Pelas responded as the prince had anticipated—with a spear of deyjiin. Ean dodged this mental spear and caught it in its passing. He couldn’t change the intent of the working, but he wagered he could rechannel it with the same intention along a new course, as a river diverted.
Clenching his teeth—Lady’s light, this is going to hurt—Ean redirected Pelas’s arrow of deyjiin into the trapped portion of his mind, directly into the compulsion that held his mind enthralled—
Pain seared his consciousness.
Blackness blanketed his vision. His thoughts went white…
When he regained consciousness, the blue sky was forming a wide dome above him, his body felt like a tree had fallen on it, and a mace was pounding his brain into mush. A hand appeared before his blurring vision. It took an embarrassing span of time to make his arm lift to take hold of it.
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