Until he remembered the Fourteenth Law: ‘Exact duplicating forces, in opposition, will nullify structure.’
If everything Patterning-related formed itself to the opposite in Shadow, then unmaking a Shadow-pattern was accomplished by making another one.
Suddenly certain he’d landed on the right answer, Ean duplicated the shadowed pattern he was seeing in the revenant, only he formed it in reverse.
Become became un-be.
Then he released his pattern of intent—not once, but as many times as he could duplicate, focus and cast it before the storm of lassitude overcame him.
Except…
The lassitude waned instead of his awareness. And where he expected to feel pain, he sensed only the pressure of inanimate bodies encircling him. Just beyond this brittle barrier, more creatures were worming through each other, trying to reach him. Ean started swimming.
Or perhaps climbing better described his rather frantic crawl towards the surface. Whenever he touched a live thing and felt its telltale sting, he cast his pattern anew. He must’ve cast it a hundred times before his head broke free of the pile and daylight blinded him.
Ean sucked in a breath of relief and looked around. The boiling froth to his right had to be Darshan. He was deep in the pit and blasting deyjiin repeatedly to work his way out.
I thought you said not to do that, Ean thought to him as he started towards him.
Darshan’s voice floated back to him on the bond, suitably sardonic. If you have a better plan, Prince of Dannym, I’m open to hearing it.
Ean threw his pattern of unmaking in a circle around himself to form a sort of shield, and in this guise ran across the mass of revenants, making stepping-stones of heads and shoulders, using deyjiin to stabilize his crossing, spreading a wake of stillness. Darshan, I’m coming for you. Don’t blast me into oblivion.
To which the immortal mentally grunted a dubious reply.
As he ran, possessed of a certainty of action he’d long missed, Ean perceived that finding this new ability was changing the pattern of consequence of his own path back in Alorin, but he also sensed that using it was weakening him there in Shadow. It would be a close thing—reaching Darshan before he drained himself too nearly; Darshan freeing himself from the froth before he made the revenants strong enough to pin him down.
Ean’s head was pounding and his body was feeling frighteningly thin by the time he broke through the sphere of creatures trying to get to Darshan. The Malorin’athgul dragged him within the circle of his whipping staff and kept trudging up the incline towards the mound where they’d first taken their stand.
Ean felt every pulse of deyjiin as a thunderclap in his skull. Every muscle in Ean’s body ached. It was no wonder he felt so drained with Darshan shaking the fabric of the world with every pulse of power and Ean drawing his power from him.
Darshan cast him a scant eye between pulses. “How did you escape them?”
“Long story.”
Darshan slammed his staff. Deyjiin pulsed. They were nearly to the rim of the mound. “When our work is finished here, I will be intrigued to hear it.”
But would their work ever be finished?
Ean was finally comprehending just how much trouble they were in. Even should they escape that city, the revenants would follow them to the next one—even to another Shadow world. They could spend their eternity hovering in the clouds above city, desert, jungle or moor, fed by deyjiin, contemplating their fates and arguing over the greater meaning of existence, but when they finally came down again—because there was nowhere else to go—the revenants would be waiting. Ean felt trapped in one of those dreams where you ran but never made any headway towards your goal.
They reached the top of the mound and Darshan exploded a pulse of power that sheared the revenants back for several hundred feet. Ean saw a glimmer of steel and jogged over to his sword. The pounding in his head made his skull feel three times larger than it should, and when he leaned down to pick up his blade, he almost fell.
Lady’s light, there had to be some other way out of this besides slaying every demon in Belloth’s hell, but to save his life, Ean couldn’t see one. The idea of escaping that place, reuniting with Isabel and meeting his son—it was all that kept him upright.
Staving off a crippling sense of futility, Ean picked up his blade and swung anew.
Seventy-four
“Love is an empty eagle who feasts on the young, the foolish, the trapped and the taken ’til either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone. Love makes prey of all.”
–The Adept truthreader Voss di Alera
Alshiba had no idea how long she and Björn made love. It might’ve been one night, or a night and a day and many nights again. She only knew it was over when a grey light seeped into the world and he rose from her bed to greet it.
Admiring Björn as he crossed the room, feeling her old self again, and yet far from herself, perhaps never again the self she’d once known, Alshiba realized that she’d been wrong to ever imagine Björn was hers. After showing her what he could do—her own life pattern placed in her hands!—he’d proven that he belonged to the realm, or perhaps to many realms, but never just to her.
This idea didn’t assuage her loss, but it brought a small measure of peace, an understanding that his choices actually cast no reflection on hers. She couldn’t have acted otherwise than she had. Nor he, as he had—not and each of them remain themselves whole. And he’d demonstrated that he loved her still, had always loved her; his more confusing actions aside, that he always would.
Standing at the windows with his back to her and his form profiled by the dawn, Björn might’ve been another man, one who didn’t scald her with his gaze or tear her heart with his choices. There was such a man in her life, if she was willing to admit him into her heart, if Björn would give him some room.
Alshiba let out her breath slowly. “What have you been doing to me?”
He turned a half-smile over his shoulder. “If you didn’t recognize that activity, love, it’s been far too long.”
“You weren’t just Healing me all this time. You were changing my life pattern.” She rolled onto her back and stared at the nymphs on her ceiling. No longer flaunting their own lovemaking, they were whispering behind their hands, staring down at her with wide, scandalized eyes. She recalled her younger self and arched a daring brow at them. “I can sense it.”
Björn returned his gaze beyond the window and said quietly, “Just a little extra protection for the days ahead, love.”
“The days ahead,” she cast him a narrow look, “of which you’ve told me so little. As much, in fact, as you told me before. We stand upon the same precipice, you and I, staring into the same beyond. Will you trust me this time?”
“It was never a matter of trust, Alshiba.” He returned to the bed and pressed her down beneath him, pressed her head into the pillow with a kiss. Then he draped himself alongside her and propped his head in one hand. His other explored her hip in a possessive caress, while his eyes studied hers with quiet intensity. “I knew if I told you my plans, you would never go along with them.”
“Damn you, Björn.” She bit back a stronger curse and tasked him with a stare of injury instead. “I would’ve done anything you asked.”
He held her gaze, profoundly serious. “I would’ve asked you to stay here and guide the realm in my stead.”
For a moment while those words sank in, Alshiba stared at him. Then she closed her eyes beneath an avalanche of understanding.
Björn kissed one of her closed eyelids. “Perhaps I did betray you in not granting you that trust,” he kissed her other lid, “in imagining you would consider our relationship, or me, more important than the realm.”
Alshiba turned her face away from him. Her throat felt dry, her chest hollow. “You should go. It’s nearly dawn.”
He stroked her face with the back of his fingers. “Do you want me to go?”
She cast censure on the spear of her glare. “I wan
t my heart to be whole again.”
By all the gods, she hated what he did to her—this discomposed, dismembered mess he made of her conviction!
“Alshiba,” Björn dragged her eyes to him as he rose from the bed, dragged her attention with him as he retrieved his pants from the floor. “You still don’t see it, do you?” He dressed himself with the same ruthless efficiency with which he’d built a world and guided the realm and shattered her heart. “You’ve held the Seat now for three hundred years. You’re a trusted member of the Council; you’re doing everything I could’ve required of you and far more than I could’ve asked of you…” he came and leaned both hands to either side of her on the bed, bringing his gaze close and his thoughts closer, so that she felt both of them impinging strongly upon her, “but if I had not broken with you, how could any of them have trusted you?”
He withdrew then, leaving her cringing beneath the lash of this truth, and continued buttoning his shirt, his jaw tight. “Sometimes we have to be our own pawns of sacrifice.”
Alshiba watched him dressing with burning eyes. Somehow she managed to find her voice. “This was your goodbye, wasn’t it?”
He cast her a look. “In the sense you mean it, yes.”
Silence bound them both while he finished dressing. In the end, he came and sat beside her on the bed. The folds of his coat hung open, undone, like herself.
Björn took her palm and kissed it. His blue eyes, gazing into hers, made her soul cry. “One day, love…” He looked her over without regret, as though already envisioning some other time, some far distant future. “One day, perhaps Epiphany will grace us to meet in the Returning, and what was done will be undone, and what was said will be forgotten, and we can love anew.” He held her gaze, studied her expression, and finding no resistance to his intent, claimed a long kiss from her. With their breath mingling, he murmured against her lips, “Epiphany has a soft spot for star-crossed lovers.”
Grief bound Alshiba’s throat too tightly, so that her words were squeezed of all life by the time they crossed her tongue. “I would not ask for that.”
He withdrew far enough to meet her gaze. “You don’t have to. It will be my prayer.”
Her heart caught in her throat. She swallowed as she watched him walking towards the balcony. The thought of never seeing him again seemed suddenly more than she could bear. “Do you—”
He looked over his shoulder.
Alshiba pressed tears from her eyes with her palms. “Do you think She listens to you?”
Björn’s grave expression lightened with his answer. “When the mood suits Her.”
Then he was out onto the balcony and gone in a blurring blink of tears.
An instant later, a knock came at her bedchamber doors.
Alshiba sucked in a shuddering breath. She pushed palms to her eyes again and called mutedly for entry.
“Your Excellency?” Her chambermaid opened the door and bobbed a curtsy. “The Speaker has summoned you. Some knights are here to provide escort and any assistance you may need.”
Assistance…because Aldaeon still believes I’m ill.
Alshiba gathered her robe and her conviction. “Tell them I’ll be ready as soon as I can.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Oh, and Mariel?”
“Yes, Your Excellency?”
“Alert them that there is something I must do along the way.”
A pair of Paladin Knights opened the doors for Alshiba, and she glided inside the Speaker’s office with the heavy silk of her white dress floating just above the tiles, her steps uninterrupted.
That is, until she rounded the corner and came to an abrupt halt. She turned a scathing look to the Speaker, who was seated behind his desk. “What is the meaning of this?”
Aldaeon H’rathigian had his long fingers folded in his lap and a grim expression lengthening the shadows beneath his cheekbones. He returned his gaze to an ailing Franco, who was clearly only standing upright because of the two knights supporting him. Niko, the Eltanin Seat Mir Arkadhi, and another truthreader were seated in a grouping of chairs, while her Third Vestal Seth Silverbow was standing at the glass doors, glaring out at the knights guarding the balcony.
“Franco has admitted to serving Björn van Gelderan, Alshiba,” the Speaker answered.
With dread gripping her, Alshiba scanned the others in the room, taking their measure in a glance. From the bruises on Franco’s face and his dazed stare, it was obvious what had been done to him—that is, if Mir’s darkly satisfied expression wasn’t telling enough. Alshiba felt a driving urge to rush to Franco, while in the same breath she ached to choke the life out of Niko and Mir. The resulting conflict made her hands twitch at her sides.
She turned with indignation stiffening her stance. “Under torture? In such a civilization as ours?”
Aldaeon scratched defeatedly at one temple. “They had reason to believe he’d been truthbound.”
“Since when does torture release a man from a truthbinding?” she demanded heatedly.
“He confessed, Alshiba.” The Speaker’s gaze sought her understanding. “The means may have been unorthodox—”
“Unorthodox,” her eyes flared dangerously.
“—but we cannot now discount the information gained thereby.”
Alshiba knew she had to keep a tight rein on her emotions. First Björn’s goodbye and now this—seeing Franco so undone. It nearly suffocated her. She managed to calm her twitching hands. “Confessions under duress can hardly be trusted.”
“He confessed first, Alshiba.” Niko sounded inordinately smug, and his improper familiarity rankled all the more. “To my face and before these others.” He held a hand to Mir Arkadhi and the other truthreader.
She turned a razor eye on all three of them. “If Franco confessed, Niko, pray why was he tortured?”
“For the other things he hadn’t confessed, obviously.” It was clear from his tone that he considered this a perfectly reasonable course of action. “And there were a good many things he hadn’t come clean on, believe you me. For instance, Franco is this so-called Admiral of the rebellion that so many of the brethren are supporting, the one trying to usurp my candidacy.” He snorted haughtily. “We’ll have those rebels in hand in quick order now, with Cephrael as my witness.”
Franco is the Admiral? The news made her want to cheer, and to weep.
Alshiba kept her gaze level, but anger was making her insides quiver like a thin blade. “Why would Franco confess anything to the pair of you?”
Mir opened his palms to the heavens and gave her a smile of benign resignation, but his colorless gaze felt like blades scraping her skin. “Conscience, perhaps, Lady Torinin? Guilt? The forest of men’s motivations requires endless exploration.”
While Eltanin’s requires little at all to understand. She made sure her thought was loud enough for every truthreader in the room to hear it.
Alshiba turned back to the Speaker. “By last accounting, it is action, not oaths, that establishes a crime in our society.” She turned a rigid gaze on the Eltanin Seat. “Why, if a man were to be judged and tried by his thoughts alone, Your Excellency, Lord Arkadhi would be partaking of the gaoler’s hospitality until the end of his days.”
I do like the way you think, Alshiba, Mir cast her a private smile.
She replied with a cold stare. Speak aloud or speak to me not at all!
Aldaeon shifted slightly in his chair. “Franco will need to stand before a formal tribunal,” his emphasis was clearly aimed at Niko and Mir, “to account for his oaths and actions, but if he’s innocent of wrongdoing against the cityworld’s canon, no punishment will be meted against him. But I believe you mistake the purpose of this gathering, Alshiba. The unfortunate circumstances aside, Franco has provided us with the information we needed to be able to send Paladin Knights to T’khendar.”
Alshiba spun to Franco in astonishment, but his dazed gaze didn’t register her concern—he hardly seemed aware of anything a
t all.
“I summoned all of your vestals here for the required vote. If all are in accord, the mission of the Paladin Knights will be to rescue Alorin’s Second and Fourth Vestals and bring Björn van Gelderan back for trial.”
“Yes!” Niko shoved to his feet. “Too long have those responsible for our race’s decline gone unpunished!”
Seth grunted from his place at the window. Alshiba stared severely at him.
“We all see this truth, do we not?” Niko stalked about, waving his hands as if trying to rouse a sluggish congregation into song. “Too long have our enemies flourished while Alorin withers! Fewer Adepts are born each year. Now, I must ask you, Speaker, is this fitting? Is it just?” He paused for effect, but Aldaeon looked confused as to whether Niko expected him to answer. He straightened as if to reply but then Niko pressed on. “No, Your Excellency! I tell you, it is not just. It is not right. Our mother world should not succumb in an effort to feed the voracious hunger of its undesired spawn!”
The Speaker’s colorless eyes tightened with a wince.
“Eloquent,” Seth remarked.
Alshiba had heard this speech at least three times. “Niko—”
“I swore upon this ring to oversee the proper use of my strand.” Niko helpfully shoved his oath-ring towards the Speaker, even though Aldaeon wore one of his own. “I swore to my people that these atrocities shall be ended!”
“Niko—” Alshiba gave a strained exhale.
Niko rushed forward and slammed his palms on the Speaker’s desk. Aldaeon recoiled in his chair. “Your Excellency, it’s time to do what should’ve been done three centuries ago. Illume Belliel must rally its forces to destroy the abomination that is T’khendar and see the Balance righted!”
Seth turned Alshiba a look that accused, This is the man you’ve chosen to replace Dagmar?
Amid the strained silence that followed, Niko finally seemed to notice the affronted stare the Speaker was leveling at him. He straightened and looked down at his ring. “Or…I suppose, bring back the Vestals for questioning, as Your Excellency determines.”
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