The crushing weight of Bethamin’s anger at last withdrew. Trembling, Kjieran pushed unsteadily to hands and knees.
“Look at me, Kjieran.”
He sat back on his heels and lifted his colorless eyes to meet the Prophet’s scalding gaze, which licked over him like flames, leaving traces of heat everywhere it touched. The fury was absent from Bethamin’s dark eyes now, but other terrible emotions took its place, and Kjieran trembled at the thoughts that had birthed them.
The Prophet cupped his chin and bade him move to his feet. “You gave yourself to me freely,” he murmured, dark eyes hot upon Kjieran, a flood of confusing emotions crossing the bond to accost him with their sharp hunger, “so I give you this in return.”
And he fastened a kiss upon Kjieran’s mouth.
In the waking world, Kjieran’s eyes flew open. He emitted a silent scream as Bethamin’s power flooded into him, filled him, spilled out of him, his master’s corruptive seed overflowing into the fragile, virgin world.
When blackness cleared from his vision, Kjieran found himself on hands and knees. A host of armed men surrounded him with Kedar centermost among them. They all watched him uneasily, swords leveled, their stance showing a readiness to act at the least provocation.
In a single motion, Kjieran rose. The men took a reflexive step backwards in a sudden jangle of shifting mail. Kjieran settled his colorless eyes on Kedar. He suspected from the man’s infuriated glare that the wielder was working some kind of pattern meant to contain him.
No one could contain him.
Kjieran felt swollen with Bethamin’s power. He’d never before been entrusted with its discretionary use, but now he inherently understood how to wield it with the Prophet’s blessing kiss.
Somewhere beyond these men, Kjieran’s king was fighting, possibly dying. Kjieran reached out and found his king’s precious life pattern and isolated it in his mind to protect Gydryn. Then he fastened a merciless gaze on Kedar. His colorless eyes blackened at the edges with the violet-dark sparkle of deyjiin, and he opened his mouth to release the flood of Bethamin’s wrath upon the world.
***
The marauder who descended on Gydryn was a beast of a man. Standing a full head taller than the king, he wielded his scimitar as a barbarian wields a club, beating and bashing with ferocity. He moved lightning quick for all he lacked finesse, making up in strength what he lacked in technique, and the king foundered beneath the brute’s onslaught.
The barbarian drove the king back with a barrage of over-handed blows, casting him forth as flotsam before the storm, and all the while more marauders poured down singing their sharp trill, until the night became saturated with the sound. Horses flew wildly past carrying screaming riders who ran down anything in their path; scimitars flashed in the night, men screamed and blood-mist stained the air. It was chaos.
Just when Gydryn thought he might be gaining the upper hand on the giant, a rider flew behind him with a shrieking trill, and his razor-edged blade pierced the king’s hauberk. Gydryn staggered and gasped in pain, and the giant’s blade took him through his left side. Before he could turn to defend himself, the man’s blade took the king again in his right shoulder.
Gydryn fell to his knees. The shock of the grievous wounds rapidly overtook his senses. Emotions surged through him confusingly, thoughts that couldn’t fully form amid a fog of pain. Some part of him recognized the danger in this disconnectedness but could do nothing to change it. Gydryn blinked as the giant came and towered over him, his hulking features grey in the pitiless moonlight. He lifted his blade and—
Exploded into ash.
Gydryn shoved an arm across his face and spun away, choking. When he raised his head, blinking the blackened remains of flesh and bone from his stinging eyes, he beheld a gruesome scene.
In every direction, men were…evaporating.
Coughing a bloody froth that tasted of bitter acid and char, the king collapsed onto his side, staring but not understanding as the battling men became strangely shadowed and then dissolved in tumbles of billowing ash, their desiccated forms simply unable to hold shape any longer. Weapons clattered dully into the sand as their owners met an unimaginable end. What horses had not been claimed fled the scene with equine screams, sensitive to whatever evil power was at work.
Gydryn inhaled a painful breath and pushed up on one elbow to gain vision of the larger field. He searched for anything that would explain what he’d just witnessed, sought any signs of life, but even the bodies of the dead had been disintegrated. No evidence of the battle remained save a field littered with swords.
Until—he saw him then. A dark figure rounded a distant dune, his cloak floating on the rising wind. Gydryn watched the figure slowly close the distance between them, a long walk across sands blackened with the slag of hundreds of men and horse.
The figure reached him and in one motion bent and scooped up the king’s weakened form into arms of stone. “My king,” he pronounced wretchedly, his voice the whisper of wind beneath the dark strands of his hair.
Gydryn could barely draw breath for the pain that consumed his damaged body in that moment; certainly not enough to form a reply. He sagged in the man’s arms, gasping, but when the man began to run, the torture was too much. The king passed out.
When he came to, he sat upon a cantering horse with the hooded man’s ebon-black arm wrapped solidly about his chest, strong as any band of iron. And dawn was upon them.
The king sought words, sought coherent thought to form into such, but the shapes wouldn’t come to his tongue. He felt a choking weight in a mouth too dry with the dust of the dead. Gydryn’s gaze dimmed again, and he tumbled once more into darkness.
He finally regained consciousness in the heat of the deep afternoon as the cloaked stranger was half-carrying, half-dragging him up a steep dune. The scalding sun blinded him, and the burning sand scoured his wounds, eliciting a moan that hardly sounded his own. At last the man slung him down on the side of the dune and stalked away. Gydryn would’ve bartered his soul for but a trickle of water. Pain seemed to come from everywhere at once, seeping out of his very pores to taint his breath.
He followed the stranger with his eyes as the man descended into the bosom of the dunes toward a vast collection of striped tents, and one by one began ripping them down.
***
Kjieran dropped the king on the side of the dune and set off toward the host of tents that had been erected for the parley. With every step, he sunk to his knees. The sun was a blistering inferno above him. It drew forth heat from the scalding sand, baked the air, and roused a furnace wind. Yet Kjieran’s struggle with the elements could not compare to the ravaging fury berating his consciousness.
The Prophet knew. And no dissembling would assuage his fury.
Kjieran didn’t know how much Bethamin had gleaned of his true intentions, but he knew Kjieran had deceived him. Now the man fought to gain control over Kjieran, body and mind.
Kjieran fought back with everything that he was.
The Prophet repeatedly threw bands of compulsion across the bond, but thanks to Raine’s amulet and Kjieran’s vigilance upon his thoughts, Bethamin couldn’t take over Kjieran completely. The compulsion fell short in the waters of Kjieran’s consciousness, yet each attempt struck those waters hurricane force, the power of his fury as sleet sheeting across freezing seas. It numbed thought and turned every action into a sluggish battle for control.
Kjieran gritted his teeth and pressed forward. Every thought—every ounce of will he could muster—he focused upon completing one action at a time. He managed each with a snarl of defiance broken by gruesome cries of pain, for his mind was fractured by the patterns that sought to bind him, by the throbbing rage of the man who sought to own him, and by his own conflicted emotions—loyalties and betrayals as a bewildering jumble of purposes whose details were rapidly losing shape.
Kjieran’s head felt an exploding sun, so he focused on putting one blackened foot before the other—on
e hand and then the next grasped the striped cloth canvas and tore the tents down with inhuman strength, until he’d gathered the entire structure into a massive, billowing tower of wood and canvas.
YOU WILL STOP THIS, KJIERAN!
Bethamin’s will impaled Kjieran’s mind, a violent rape of his determinism. He staggered beneath the onslaught and fell to his knees and he screamed. Compulsion drew forth unwilling emotions as a needle drew blood, and Kjieran writhed in the sand, his body shaking and twitching. In that moment, he could do naught but gaze upwards at the blinding sun, knowing only the piercing agony of Bethamin’s disfavor and the intensity of his unrelenting determination.
But the Prophet’s attempt to claim him failed, and as the force of his working faded, Kjieran regained himself. Trembling, he attempted to push to hands and knees but just as quickly collapsed again with a sharp gasp.
All of his ribs had broken.
Several minutes passed before he found the will to move. When he did, pain blazed violently. Yet he welcomed its heat, for it was a cruel, if potent, reminder that part of him could still be harmed, that some portion of him yet walked elae’s path.
Kjieran lifted his gaze far across the clearing and focused on the supply tent. Grunting with the effort, he lifted himself from the sand and staggered toward the tents with determination as his only fuel.
With the Prophet casting damnations at him all the while from the other end of their hateful bond, Kjieran dragged a single barrel from the supply tent and heaved the cask atop the towering pile of canvas and wood. The barrel split upon landing.
Kjieran stumbled back in a faltering, drunkard’s slog and assessed the pyre. A clear fluid spewed from the split barrel. Absinthe. Drunk in quantity by Radov’s troops, it had been stocked for the parley’s concluding feast. Kjieran would put the volatile spirit to better use.
KJIERAN I DEMAND YOU CEASE UPON THIS COURSE!
Bethamin sought to drag him into his own mind once more, but Kjieran resisted fiercely. Should he fall beneath the Prophet’s will this time, there would be no return to consciousness.
Bethamin’s battering will lashed him repeatedly, as if to expurgate his defiance. Kjieran gripped his medallion and clenched his teeth. Holding onto himself with a will he’d never imagined possible, he pointed his fingers toward the barrel and gathered elae to him.
The process was laboriously slow and as painful as trying to breathe under water. All the while, the Prophet’s whip cracked against Kjieran’s consciousness, bringing stinging tears of pain and betrayal, commanding contrition—all of these intermingled with Bethamin’s own immeasurable fury.
Kjieran summoned elae. A part of his shattered mind wondered if his goddess was not somehow helping him…
And then, with a surge of elation, he held the lifeforce in his grasp. Just the tiniest tendril, but it was enough.
He cast a spark of the fourth strand toward the absinthe-soaked canvas and then fell to his knees as it arced through the air…
Searing heat buffeted him as the entire pyre erupted.
With the explosion still echoing against the surrounding cliffs, Kjieran dragged himself to his feet and across the clearing toward Gydryn’s inert body. He dropped to his knees at the king’s side.
“Sire,” Kjieran gasped even as Bethamin’s infuriated will bombarded him.
The king blinked open bloodshot eyes. His life, too, was in Epiphany’s hands.
Gydryn seemed only then to recognize Kjieran, for his eyes widened and his lips formed a dry whisper too faint to be heard above the roaring flames.
Kjieran took a water flask from his belt and held it to the king’s cracked lips, letting a trickle of liquid moisten them. The king drank what he offered, but his eyes never left Kjieran’s.
Bethamin’s presence filled Kjieran’s mind, and Kjieran knew the Prophet would have him any second. Already each moment seemed twice as removed from the end of his path as the one that had come before. He felt as if the Prophet was hauling him backwards, away from the death he so desperately sought. Time grew frighteningly short.
Holding the king’s questioning gaze, Kjieran looked down at the bulging muscles of his blackened chest. Just a circle of pale flesh remained where Raine’s amulet lay. Stronger even than Bethamin’s fury was Kjieran’s desire to confess.
Tears streamed down his face as Kjieran pushed fingers into the king’s shoulder, eliciting a gasp of pain. He stared hard into Gydryn’s eyes, not daring to speak, as he scrawled instead across his own ravaged chest,
he sees what I see
The king’s eyes widened.
“Sire,” Kjieran managed a pitiful rasp, barely able to summon the will to form the words again, “Your son…Trell lives. The princes’ deaths…it was Radov—”
Abruptly Kjieran screamed, assaulted by the fury and violence of the Prophet’s piercing contention.
Kjieran yanked Raine’s amulet free of his neck and shoved it into Gydryn’s hand.
Then, with a last cry of despair, he tore himself away.
Bethamin filled him as he fled in a staggering gait, his mind only moments from domination.
Reaching the pyre, Kjieran took a running leap and flung himself high into the flames. The Prophet thundered and raged, and Kjieran became the voice of his fury as he let out a howl that pierced the sky. His dark hair exploded in flames. The flesh of his face charred and blackened and peeled away, revealing an ebon skull beneath.
Only when he reached the top and fiercest part of the pyre did he collapse. As he succumbed then to the flames, to the guilt and grief and fear, the Prophet abandoned his impotent fury and grew silent…still.
Time seemed to ebb and wane. What few remaining living parts Kjieran possessed soon boiled away, leaving him in silent agony unable even to cry out, pinned to that petrified flesh in darkness.
He couldn’t know if it would work, and as he lay in blind agony, he understood a new level of terror. For this was his last hope. If his plan failed, his blackened body would emerge from the charred pyre of dying flames seemingly unscathed but for the utter corruption of his soul.
Kjieran desperately wished that Bethamin would leave him to his despair and his grief, that he might meet his end in peace and be spared finally from the Prophet’s lustful desires. But the man’s presence remained, hovering within his consciousness, drinking in his desolate thoughts.
At last the pyre shuddered beneath Kjieran, and his ravaged body tumbled into the deep well of coals. A geyser of fiery cinders and smoke erupted to join the billowing clouds already darkening the sky, and new flames sprouted where others had ebbed. As the heat of the fire’s core latched onto Kjieran’s mutated flesh, its hunger at last proved superior to Dore’s working.
Kjieran thought he’d traveled the gamut of pain’s many forms, yet he realized in that moment that he’d barely begun to explore them. As he opened his mouth in a soundless scream, his jaw dissolved to cinders. He tried to flail his arms, but his stone hands melted into lava. Only then, as Dore’s very pattern caught the flame, did Kjieran finally fade from consciousness.
His life ebbed as his spirit withdrew from the world of men. Death hovered with shadowed, gossamer wings. Kjieran stared into the void of unmaking, desperate for the oblivion it offered. And then…
A flicker in the darkness.
Into the void, a spark erupted. The goddess of Kjieran’s dream pierced the descending veil of death, appearing as a too-brilliant form with wings of shimmering light. She descended to claim him before he slid into the void of unmaking, and he heard her voice as music, as light itself might speak if it could manifest in sound.
What troubles you, Kjieran? asked the butterfly that was a goddess.
“I fear I will lose myself forever,” Kjieran wept into the void, knowing his spirit yet hovered close to the shadows—so close that their kiss was a chilling caress, the promise of unmaking a dreadful temptation.
Would you bind yourself to me and know rebirth?
“I a
m bound to another already,” Kjieran’s soul cried, destitute by this truth. He turned his awareness toward the hovering shadows, for he sought the embrace of unmaking over the eternal knowledge of all that he’d lost.
But the goddess flamed before him, and her light drew his spirit back. This was done against your will, she told him in the way of spirits, her shimmering form shifting so rapidly that Kjieran saw multiple shapes coalesce and dissolve again. Such bindings are never strong.
Kjieran’s soul trembled as he confessed his deepest fear, “But the working was bound with the fifth.”
The goddess shimmered and blazed. The fifth cannot bind your soul once the body is gone. She glowed so brightly that he could barely look upon her. But I can…should you wish it.
Yes, he knew that she could, for she was the lifeforce of the fourth strand and that of creation, and the kinetic energy of the second strand and even the wildly variant aspects of the third—she was every strand but the fifth. She was Life.
She was elae.
“My lady,” Kjieran’s soul gasped into the void, which had become saturated now with light, “I would bind myself to you a thousand times and again.”
Her shimmering wings enfolded his battered spirit, and Kjieran became blinded by brilliance. By a flooding warmth. By the sudden acute awareness of the millions of souls who had bound themselves to her and been reborn.
Finally then did he feel the bond with Bethamin dissolving—even the fifth-strand pattern seared away. The Prophet’s anguished wail faded to a whisper and was gone.
The last thing Kjieran knew was the bliss of Epiphany’s final blessing.
Then let it be so, Kjieran van Stone.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 79
