Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One

by McPhail, Melissa

  Trell shook his head with a smile of disbelief. Then he looked around in the dim morning light. To his right, the waterfall formed a rushing bridal veil falling from thirty feet above. Trell’s eyes followed the flow of water from its rim to its frothing base. There, a watery figure beckoned.

  Trell blinked.

  Upon a second glance, he saw nothing in the water, but the image remained in memory.

  Carian meanwhile felt around on his person until he found his pouch of tabac. When Trell arched brows at him, he grinned and announced, “Oilcloth. A sailor’s always prepared for wet weather.” He withdrew a piece of flint from inside the pouch and grabbed his dagger. A moment later, he was reclining on one elbow enveloped in a smoky haze.

  Trell found his attention straying back to the waterfall. He couldn’t get the image of the figure out of his mind. He left Carian on the beach and wandered into the water, making his way closer to the waterfall. It was perhaps ten paces wide at its base, a myriad cascade of frothing veils falling from varied heights. One of these veils projected more broadly and widely than the others as the water fell over a jutting boulder midway up the falls.

  Whether it was instinct that guided Trell or a vision-gift from his goddess, he dove into the pool on a hunch and swam beneath the plunging waters. Coming up on the other side, he found a deep cave. A dark beach gleamed dimly further within, and Trell swam over to it. He pulled himself out onto the dark sand and turned to face the curtain of water. Riversong filled his ears, heady and cacophonous. In that moment, the sun broke over the jungle rim and set fire to the falls.

  Trell caught his breath. In the sunlight, the sheer curtain became a fall of stars, diamonds split with rainbow hues. For the briefest instant, he thought he saw his Goddess’s face smiling there, but just as quickly she was gone, swallowed again by the raging waters. Trell’s heart pounded in his chest, and his throat became tight with gratitude. What had he done to be so blessed?

  Perhaps ’tis not what you’ve done, but what you will do.

  It was Fhionna that seemed to speak the words in his mind, the timbre of her voice rough with passion, as it had been on their last night together. Once again he felt her breath in his ear, felt her body pinned beneath his, her long legs locked around his hips to seal their joining, her bare breasts ripe for his pleasure.

  “I love you, Trell of the Tides,” Fhionna had promised as she pressed against him, her breath in his hair, their skin alive with each other’s touch. “My heart will always belong to you…”

  Trell lay back on the sand and grinned wearily. Thank you, my goddess. Thank you for these treasured memories. Thank you!

  “Trell? …Trell?” Carian’s voice drifted weakly from beyond the falls.

  Reluctantly, Trell slipped back into the water, dove low, and came up again in the pool beyond. Daylight bathed the tiny lagoon as he surfaced.

  “Oh good,” said the pirate as Trell’s head emerged. “I think this is a sacred place. Look.” He held up several bone necklaces, each charm carved in a different face or animal. “There’s tons of stuff washed up in here. Offerings, I think.”

  Trell slogged up onto the sand. “There’s a cave behind the falls.” He walked to check on Gendaia and began looking her over from fetlocks to hindquarters. “I think we’re meant to go there.”

  “Meant,” Carian repeated, aiming a skeptical look his way. “By whom?”

  “Naiadithine.”

  “Who is?”

  Trell squatted on his heels and looked up at the tall Nodefinder. The man made a fierce impression with his dark hair plastered around his shoulders and his angular face drawn in contrasting shadows. “Naiadithine is the Akkadian goddess of the waters,” he said. He finished inspecting Gendaia. It was nothing less than a miracle that she’d retained only minor scratches—Naiadithine had indeed been watching over her. Straightening again, he added, “The Bemothi call her Thalassa, but I think your folk name her Tethys.”

  “Tethys.” Carian barked a laugh. “Tethys!” He stared wondrously at Trell. “You say you’re blessed of Tethys?”

  Trell shrugged. “So it would seem.”

  The Nodefinder burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that he eventually fell down. Then he rolled over onto his back and laughed some more, holding his belly as if it would burst. Finally, he composed himself, propped up on one elbow to rest his sand-covered head in hand, and leveled Trell a mockingly serious look. “Okay…well, if Tethys says to swim behind the waterfall, we’d better do it.” He made a show then of preparing for the adventure, but he wasn’t very good at suppressing his mirth at the idea.

  Trell frowned at him. He took Gendaia by the nose and looked into her eyes. “We have to swim beneath the falling water,” he told her in the desert tongue. “It is Naiadithine’s wish that we do this. Shall I cover your eyes, beautiful Daybreak?”

  Gendaia jerked her head out of his grasp and shook herself all over, splattering water everywhere.

  Trell took that as a no.

  He glanced to the pirate and found him standing with two necklaces in hand as if comparing them. Then he seemed to make a decision, shrugged, and put them both on.

  “You can’t take those,” Trell protested. “They’re offerings to the god of this place.”

  “The god obviously wanted us to have them,” Carian returned tartly, “otherwise she wouldn’t have brought us here.” The pirate gave him one last taunting look and then dove into the pool.

  Glaring disapprovingly after him, Trell led Gendaia into the water. She shimmied her coat several times as they walked deeper into the pool until they finally felt the earth fall out from beneath them. Gendaia stayed by his side as he swam for the falls, and he felt her near him still as he dove beneath the water, the tension on her reins all the reassurance he needed that she followed. He’d never heard of a horse willingly swimming beneath falling water, but then Gendaia was a mage’s horse and a Hallovian besides. Who knew what she was capable of?

  Trell surfaced in the dim cave and saw with relief Gendaia swimming beside him and seeming no worse for the experience. They climbed out on to the black sand beach together, and Gendaia shook her coat with a massive spray of water. Trell paused upon reaching the pirate’s side, however, for the man stood terribly still, wearing a stunned expression.

  “I don’t believe it,” he whispered, all mocking lost from his tone. “I just…don’t believe it.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Carian turned to him, and his brown eyes were wide, incredulous. “You really are favored of Tethys. I mean…there’s no other explanation…”

  Trell took the islander’s arm. “Carian, what’s wrong?”

  The pirate looked thunderstruck. “It’s…a weld.”

  Trell shook his head, not comprehending.

  Carian turned back to face a nebulous point further along the cave. “A weld is a major joining of the pattern of the realm,” he murmured, motioning to where it must be, though Trell saw nothing but sand. “There’s only a hundred or so of them in the entire world, and most of their locations are hidden without the use of a weld map—of which there are but a few left in the known. From a weld, a Nodefinder can travel anywhere. Anywhere.” He gave Trell a look of incredulity.

  Then he burst out laughing. Carian doubled over to rest hands on his knees as he announced through his laughter, “It’s a bloody, freaking weld!”

  But Trell hardly heard him, for Naiadithine’s loving whisper was loudest in his ears.

  Follow the water, Trell of the Tides.

  Thirty-eight

  ‘Time means nothing to the gods even as a single life means everything to a man, because he fears he will have only one. Gods know better.’

  – The Agasi wielder Markal Morrelaine

  The Shade stood staring into the huge, iron-edged mirror with a mixture of horror and fascination on his silver features. He arched his brows and saw the shining chrome face move in concert. He opened his mouth and looked at his teeth—they we
re normal, white, just slightly crooked in the front, though he didn’t remember feeling that chipped molar before…before…

  Before I was murdered.

  He forced himself to remember this one truth, for all else seemed a hellish fiction. Surely this was hell where he found himself now.

  I was murdered.

  And here he now stood.

  I was murdered.

  But still he lived.

  Reincarnated as a Shade!

  The knowledge made him tremble. Yet this was meant to be a mercy.

  A mercy!

  So they told him, and so he tried to believe.

  He watched his reflection in the mirror as he lifted his hands to touch the strange chrome skin, which mirrored his polished silver fingers as they neared. He felt his own touch through his new skin. Metal, and yet living flesh. He looked into his obsidian eyes, seeing the barest glint of amber in their depths. Were his own eyes still there somewhere, or was it a trick of the light?

  They’d told him why his eyes had to change, why his skin was necessarily replaced by the alloyed metal. Some few Adepts could handle the terrible power without their bodily forms deteriorating, but most men could not. Since recovering from the death-sleep, he’d felt his own power stirring like an embryo inside him, but he dared not do more with it than acknowledge it was there.

  ‘Once you share the bond with our master,’ his mentor had told him, ‘you will share the knowledge of how to wield deyjiin.’

  The bond.

  More than anything else he’d been told about since waking in T’khendar—and most of it was horrible enough to drive even the bravest man insane—the Shade was most afraid of this bond.

  ‘He will not bond you against your will,’ they had assured him, the other Shades who were his blood-brothers now, but without the bond you will die again, and this death will be forever.’

  It wasn’t exactly a heartening choice.

  Smoke appeared in the mirror, coalescing behind him, and his mentor, Reyd, soon stood solid in its place. The Shade had learned the trick of disapparating already, but the act scared him immensely. To feel all that was himself dissolving into nothingness was so like unto death that he would reflexively pull all of his particles inwards just at the moment he would have ‘elevated to shadows.’ He couldn’t do it—he couldn’t let himself become nothing.

  “Comfort in phasing will come, in time,” Reyd said from behind him, knowing his mind. Among all Shades, there was a connectivity with each other’s thoughts that he was still getting used to, a sharing of knowledge that felt neither an intrusion nor a violation but merely an awareness of others that was sometimes acute—as it was just then with Reyd—but more often seemed as nebulous as his new form. Of the many strange sensations he’d encountered since leaving the death-sleep, the shared mind alone wasn’t wholly uncomfortable; at least he never felt lonesome.

  Though he heard Reyd’s words of encouragement both within the shared mind and through his living ears, the Shade did not turn from his inspection of his reflection. Wasn’t there some myth about hellish creatures casting no reflection? It must’ve been some other kind of demon…

  “The First Lord comes,” Reyd observed. “Are you ready?”

  The Shade turned from the mirror to face his mentor, a living mirror-image of himself. Though in truth, Reyd did not look like him—not really. The Shade could see the vestiges of the other man’s own features deep within the metal tissue, even as he could see those haunting reminders of his own former self.

  A mercy, he thought, wishing he could still cry. Is it a mercy to live an eternity without her?

  Reyd gazed compassionately upon him. “There is a saying where I come from,” he said.

  “What is it?” the Shade asked, wishing he could find hope again, wishing there was a reason to continue on, to accept the First Lord’s bond and endure this tragic existence.

  “The saying is, ‘A love that can end has never been real.’”

  The Shade felt his dead heart flutter. What his new brother intimated was too unlikely to be believed. Yet he was surprised to realize that he suddenly hoped—that indeed, he prayed it could be…possible. He lifted his gaze to Reyd, his mentor and only friend so far in his new life. “Will the bond…hurt?”

  Reyd shook his head. His hair was also black, like the Shade’s own. He’d seen some blonde Shades in T’khendar. They looked…odd. “The bond with the First Lord is painless,” Reyd said, “but…”

  The Shade saw Reyd’s slight frown; he felt his hesitation, he heard whispers of his fears in the shared mind. “But what?”

  “But the knowledge you will gain is not.”

  The Shade swallowed. He’d been told what to expect many times over, but asking the questions again kept his mind off his fear. “Will I see everything he sees and know everything he knows?”

  “Only during the bonding will parts of his mind be open to you. Thereafter our thoughts and perceptions flow into him but his do not flow to us.”

  ‘And without the bond, you will die…’

  It didn’t seem possible that one man could be the source of life for so many.

  “That’s too simplistic an explanation,” Reyd cautioned. “Do not seek to couch in human terms what is yet beyond you. Once you have seen his mind, you will understand better how we exist.”

  “And then I must choose.”

  “Yes. To live in his service, or to dissipate for eternity; for without the bond—without elae to pin your living spirit to this shell of shadows—you will move on.”

  Feeling vestiges of panic at the thought, the Shade looked to his mentor, looked into his eyes so like and yet so unlike his own. “Do you regret your choice?”

  “I did…once. But no longer.”

  “Because of what you learned from the First Lord?”

  Reyd looked past him down the hall as he answered, “Because there is no game to be played in death.”

  “Players and pieces,” said a resonant voice from the direction in which Reyd was staring. The Shade turned to see a tall man advancing down the passage. He wore a coat the color of sky, and his black curls framed a handsome face with eyes that were impossibly blue.

  “Rad nath, First Lord,” Reyd murmured with a bow of greeting.

  The First Lord stopped before them and looked at his newest Shade. “Players know the rules,” he said casually, referencing his earlier comment. “Pieces merely obey them. Which would you choose to be?”

  The Shade felt power emanating from the First Lord in a way he’d never experienced or even conceived possible. He’d known powerful men, commanding men, robust men of action and noble men of honor; what he felt in the presence of the First Lord was something so far beyond any of these that the use of human terms to describe it seemed simply inadequate.

  Swallowing, the Shade met his master’s gaze for the first time. His eyes were knowledgeable, worldly, compassionate, interested—but above all of these, they were intense!

  Blazing intensity, thought the Shade as he trembled inside, that is as close as I can think of in words to describe him. “My lord,” he managed, “am I meant to choose one of these roles before I choose to swear my oath and…live or die?”

  “I meant only to inquire as to your point of view,” the First Lord answered with a smile. “Are you a man who would choose to live or die by your own choices, or to play out the choices of another? It was a question of personal ideology, not loyalty.”

  The Shade glanced quickly to his mentor, who prodded with an encouraging look. “I think,” the Shade said then, looking back to the First Lord though it took enormous self-control to meet his gaze, “that if I were given a choice, I would rather be a player than a piece.”

  The First Lord accepted this with a nod. The Shade couldn’t tell if he was pleased or indifferent about it. “Has he been fully briefed?” the First Lord asked Reyd.

  “Yes, ma dieul.”

  The First Lord looked back to the Shade. “Are you ready
to submit yourself into my control that you might better understand that to which you would be swearing your oath?”

  With a mouth gone suddenly dry, the Shade nodded.

  The First Lord placed his left hand around the back of the Shade’s neck and pressed his right thumb to the Shade’s forehead. From the moment he felt the First Lord’s touch, the Shade felt also a tingling sensation that soon spread throughout his body. “Be easy and submit to me,” the First Lord murmured.

  The Shade closed his eyes and saw…he saw…

  Images, thoughts, feelings—heartache, tragedy, treason, betrayal, sacrifice, longing, agony, ecstasy, triumph—lifetimes of memories flashed before him. He struggled to keep up at first, but finally he gave in and let the pictures flash by, brilliant, painful, bold…until he began to understand, the story unfolding like a many-petaled flower, a flower that was a pattern, a pattern that spanned the ages…

  When Björn released him, the Shade recovered as if from a daze. He felt the wetness of tears on his face, but in the same moment he understood that it was elae that gave his body life. Looking around, he realized he’d fallen to his knees, but he hadn’t the will to stand. He was overwhelmed. If it was true…but of course it was. He could feel the truth in the very fibers of his soul.

  He knew then why the others had chosen as they had. He now conceived of the future in a sense that had never meant anything to him before. “My lord,” he whispered in a choked voice, unable to meet the gaze of this man whose thoughts he now knew too intimately, “I know the bonding will tie me to you, and the oath will limit my will…but must I live for you alone?”

  The First Lord’s gaze was gentle now as he looked upon his newest Shade. “Live for any purpose you desire.”

  The Shade’s eyes flew to his master’s. Slowly he got to his feet and pressed hands together before him. The First Lord smiled as he placed his hands to either side of the Shade’s.