The others rose willingly. To see their prince in such a state was convincing of his need; whether or not they agreed with him, no one would argue.
As Tanis was rising to go, Ean said, “Tanis, I would have you remain…if you like.”
But the lad pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Your Highness, my skills are of no value to you here.” He rested his gaze on the zanthyr. “I see only what truths he wants me to see, the same as you, I’ll warrant.”
Ean nodded, and Tanis took his leave, finding his way to his bedroll and the blessed oblivion of sleep.
***
Much later, when all were well abed, Ean finally spoke his mind. “Did you know from the start?” he asked the zanthyr after they’d been sitting in silence for some time just tending the fire. Phaedor glanced up with an inquiring look. “When you rescued me,” Ean clarified, “did you know what I was? That I had Awakened?”
The zanthyr regarded him levelly. “Yes.”
Ean exhaled and shook his head at the irony. To think how far he’d had to come to gain that knowledge, how much had been endured and lost…and he might’ve known it from the start if only he’d asked the right questions. It was depressing as hell. “How did you know?” he asked, lifting grey eyes to the man. “Was it the pattern on my invitation?”
“You first gained the notice of others in that fashion,” Phaedor said, “but this was no proof of your Awakening.”
“What then?”
The zanthyr cast him a sideways look. “Have you no recollection of your first encounter with the Geshaiwyn?”
“Yes. At the beach, the lunatic pinned me and went on and on about his blade named Jeshuelle.”
The zanthyr arched a solitary raven brow. “My mistake. I was not aware that he’d come so close to claiming you once. I am referring then to the second time the Geshaiwyn attacked you.”
“Oh.” Ean frowned. He remembered the man leaping down into the pit with him and their brief struggle, and he remembered being stabbed, and—
It came to him in a moment of clarity. The dagger flashing again and again toward his bleeding wound but unable to touch him.
“Yes,” murmured the zanthyr, noting Ean’s expression.
Ean lifted troubled eyes to the zanthyr. “But that was—”
“Of your doing,” he confirmed. “In that moment, you became present on the currents.”
“But I don’t even know what I did!”
Phaedor shrugged. “You must’ve known the working well in your prior existence for its pattern to appear so instinctively to you.”
Ean stared hard at the creature. “You’re saying…but that would mean I have the ability to work patterns as well as to unwork them.”
The zanthyr leaned indolently on one elbow and flicked at a bit of ash that dared alight upon his cloak. “Who told you otherwise?”
Ean glared at him. “You did.”
“Ah, yes.” Phaedor grinned impudently. “I also told you not to trust me, if memory serves.”
“As if I could find it within myself to distrust a man who repeatedly saves my life,” Ean countered. “That’s lunacy.”
“Suit yourself.”
Ean reached over and placed a hand on the zanthyr’s leg, capturing his attention with eyes suddenly serious. “But it’s the unworking that matters, isn’t it? This is why Björn wants me dead.”
The zanthyr considered him for a long time in silence. Finally, he sat up and rested an elbow on one bent knee. “I knew you were an Adept when I took you from the Shade’s camp, but I realized the nature of your talent when you saw the mindtrap.” He leveled the prince a telling look. “For the untrained, to see a pattern at all belies a gift, but to see where it begins and ends…this is unique and rare. Seeing patterns is only part of your gift, though a very important aspect in its own right, but unworking them…to unwork a pattern is infinitely more dangerous than working one.”
Ean frowned at this idea. “Why?”
“An extant pattern holds all of its power charged within it. One must know exactly where the pattern begins and ends to attempt its unraveling.”
“Or?”
The zanthyr settled him a disquieting stare. “At best, nothing happens. At worst, however,” and here he arched a brow, “at worst, all of the pattern’s collected energy explodes. Like the dry fir limbs you’ve tossed upon the fire this night, the pent-up vitality of the pattern erupts with violent force, taking everything nearby along with it.”
Ean went cold. To think he had undone a Marquiin’s deadly pattern with curious indifference! Might the entire company have been killed if he’d pulled one single strand of it incorrectly? He forced back a latent sense of panic and tried to find calm and organize his thoughts. It took several long minutes.
Pushing on then, he looked at Phaedor intently. “I have another question, if you will do me the service of listening.”
The zanthyr gave him a look of tolerant amusement.
“What power did you use to protect us? It wasn’t elae, was it?”
The zanthyr cast him a narrow look, as if to determine how worthy he was of an answer. “Your enemy searched for signs of elae and those who work it,” Phaedor offered. “Adepts as yourself, the Healer, the Avieth, and Tanis, cannot help but hold elae captive within your life patterns; you are nets that capture and slow the flowing currents. He searched for evidence of you on the currents, thus I could not use elae to protect you from him, for it would only have drawn his eye closer to us.”
“Then what?”
Phaedor leaned back on one elbow and flipped his dagger again. “His own power.”
“Which is what?”
Phaedor assessed him in one sweep of emerald eyes. “The power that roams freely beyond the edge of the known universe. Deyjiin.”
Ean went cold. Raine’s warning echoed in memory, ‘There was little left of the man I’d known, just a haunted shell…You couldn’t even see his eyes, so devoured they’d become by his dark power…’
What did it mean that the zanthyr could work deyjiin? Ean understood that Björn and Malachai worked the power and that both of their minds had been destroyed by its malicious nature—Malachai waging a mad war upon his own race and Björn taking up his banner when he fell. Yet the zanthyr seemed nothing if not entirely sane.
Ean looked back to Phaedor and found the man watching him with a penetrating stare. Unnerved, Ean swallowed and dropped his gaze. Shade and darkness! Everything he knew shouted in warning: here is danger, here is betrayal, here is certain death! Yet for all of this, he couldn’t find it in his heart to mistrust the creature. The very idea drew such welling rage of protest that he couldn’t even conceive of it. So he drew in a deep breath and exhaled his fear, letting it bleed into the air and dissipate with the fire’s pale smoke.
“Deyjiin,” he murmured to himself. Surely then the strange intruder, his enemy, must’ve been a minion of Björn’s, for who else worked the dreadful power?
Only the creature before you.
The thought made him shudder, and Ean decided out of self-preservation to push the thought away. He lifted grey eyes to Phaedor. “So this enemy of mine,” he posed, feeling the man’s lingering menace like a malaise he couldn’t shake. “If he works deyjiin and I don’t, how can I possibly defeat him?”
Phaedor eyed him sagaciously. “However indeed?”
Ean frowned at him and then turned to frown at the fire. The zanthyr intimated he should know the answer already, but the mystery seemed overwhelming…
“Sleep on it, perhaps,” Phaedor suggested, pulling Ean back from a stream of thoughts that were fast rushing him far away.
Ean looked up to find the creature watching him with a peculiar intensity. It was disconcerting to look into those eyes…as if glancing up just in time to see the face of death right before it pounces upon you. “I…I guess I should.”
He rose to go, but then he turned back again. There was something he just had to say. “I try not to, for my
own sake,” he admitted, “but I do trust you, Phaedor. I’m sorry if the knowledge brings you displeasure. It just happens to be the truth.”
The zanthyr’s gaze was impenetrable. “Sleep well, my prince.” He arched a raven brow and added quietly, “Tomorrow is a new day.”
Forty-nine
‘To know the divine essence of Jai’Gar, look first inside yourselves.’
– Emir Zafir bin Safwan al Abdul-Basir to the newly Converted
Trell reined Gendaia directly toward the Tivaricum gates in a ground-eating canter as soldiers shouted and horns blared, Carian clinging to him from a precarious perch behind his saddle.
“Where is it?” Trell growled ferociously, watching the rapidly approaching gate with trepidation. “Where’s the node?”
“Straight ahead!” shouted the pirate.
Trell gritted his teeth and prayed Gendaia would hold true. Most horses didn’t take kindly to being run straight through a wall, and while she was not a common horse, Trell despised testing his luck. He couldn’t image he had many chances left to redeem himself in Thalma’s eyes.
“Carian…” Trell growled as the wall loomed closer.
“Hold on!” said the pirate with a toothsome grin, and—
—they were suddenly galloping through another courtyard surrounded by high stone walls. Trell pulled Gendaia to a skidding halt, raising a curtain of dust in their wake.
“What are you doing?” Carian screamed at him. He slapped Gendaia’s flank desperately. “Don’t stop! Ride for the other side! Go! Go!”
Trell had time to gaze with dismay at the soldiers who were just then pouring into the yard, and then a dark-haired man in the livery of a noble house came rushing out of a door. He took one look at Carian and his eyes went wide. “It’s that mad pirate!” he shouted in Veneisean, pointing heatedly. “Stop him! Stop him!”
Trell growled and curse and set heels to Gendaia. She leapt into a canter, twisting just in time around a soldier who made a grab for her reins and then darting across the wide yard toward an iron gate.
“We’re going the wrong way!” Carian yelled. The Veneisean man led the pack of soldiers behind them, shouting furiously.
“Where is it then?” Trell snarled.
“The other gate. Behind us!”
Clenching his teeth, Trell dug in with his heels and reined Gendaia into a skidding turn that took out two men like toy soldiers, sending them sprawling. Trell wheeled her around, back in the direction they’d just come. They passed hazardously close to the shouting Veneisean, and Trell got a good look at his face.
“Mon dieu!” the man exclaimed, his eyes going wide as saucers. “Mon dieu! It’s zee brozaire!” He ran after Trell shouting in the common tongue, “Stop, sir! Stop! Your brozaire is looking for you!”
“Ha ha!” Carian exclaimed, for the gate and its hidden node were nigh. “And here…we…go!”
Gendaia crossed the node, and suddenly Trell and Carian were galloping on a grassy hillside beneath a solemn moon. Trell eased Gendaia and himself let out a sigh of relief, whereupon he turned the pirate a black look over his shoulder.
Carian raised both hands. “Don’t worry, I felt like walking anyway.” He launched himself from Gendaia’s haunches grinning from ear to ear.
Trell exhaled a measured breath and leaned forward to stroke Gendaia’s neck. If anything, she seemed less disturbed than he was and began grazing happily in the meadow. Trell turned to the pirate, who was just then rolling himself a smoke, and inquired testily, “So how many more times must I save your life before we arrive at our destination?”
“You don’t get any bonuses for that, you know,” Carian muttered. He fumbled with his flint and dagger, making a face. “I’m not renegotiating our accord.”
Trell gazed around into the night. “From Tregarion to where? And where are we now?”
“All of the Veneisean cities are connected with nodes,” the pirate explained, looking up with the fag hanging in the corner of his mouth. “The stockades were built that way to ensure quick reinforcements and movement of troops throughout the kingdom. But the nodes are only accessed from within the stockades.”
“That’s why so many visits with the Tivaricum Guard?” Trell surmised. “To use their nodes to travel about the kingdom?”
“And here I thought you were just a pretty face.”
Exhaling a tired sigh, Trell dismounted and looked around. “So where are we now?”
Carian exhaled a cloud of smoke. “In the Xanthian foothills, couple of days north of Rethynnea. Hike that way a few miles,” he added, pointing toward a low ridge, “and you’ll see the bay in all its jeweled glory.”
Trell pulled a flagon of water from his packs and took a long draught. As he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, he gazed at the flagon. It was amazing to think, with all the places he’d been and seen in the past three days, that this water might’ve come from the Akkadian side of the Assifiyahs. Capping the flagon again, he posed, “So what is this thing you seek that you’d brave Shi’ma, Veneisean soldiers and a homicidal housewife to claim it?”
Carian sat down in the long grass and extended his boots in front of him. He leaned back on one elbow and gazed at the starry heavens, blowing lazy rings of smoke toward the stars. “Remember Naiadithine’s weld?”
Trell settled down beside him and rested elbows on knees. “If memory serves,” he remarked with the shadow of a smile. “But I can’t be certain—it was so long ago…”
“Yeah, you’re funny. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Very much, Carian vran Lea.”
Carian blew three rings of smoke in quick succession, his cheeks puffing and deflating with the motion. “Welds are a Nodefinder’s greatest boon,” he said, casting Trell a sideways glance. “Most—like the one we arrived on in Tregarion—are controlled by the Guild and can be traveled for an exorbitant fee—and people call me a pirate,” he complained, shaking his head. “Anyway, outside of the ones controlled by the Guild, most of the welds are unknown in this day and age.”
“Why?”
“Because there are only two weld maps left in existence, and one of those is imprisoned with the Great Master in T’khendar.”
Trell decided to come back to that curious nugget later, asking instead, “Somehow I got the idea that you could travel a series of nodes and leis and create something of a map yourself.”
“Yeah,” the pirate said, letting smoke filter up around his face, “but not with welds. They’re much harder to pinpoint. You can’t find them unless you’re on top of them—not without a map, that is.”
“And your omnipotent Guild doesn’t have a map?”
Carian cast him an enigmatic look. “The Guild maps were housed in the Citadel archives. They were lost when Tiern’aval was ripped from the world.”
Trell held his gaze. “I think I begin to see.”
“You’re a brighter lad than I gave you credit for,” he complimented. “Usually the pretty ones haven’t a pat of intelligence spread between them.”
“Yes, it’s a miracle I’ve made it this far in life. I’m sure to tumble into a ditch tomorrow and that will be the end of me for want of a way out.”
Carian settled him a quizzical look. The fag hung from the corner of his mouth emitting a thin plume of lazy smoke. “So what was all that back there at the Tivaricum? Who do they think you are?”
This was the last subject Trell wanted to trivialize with conjecture or even speak about at all. “They didn’t exactly expound on their theories, Carian.”
“That’s a fine stroke of ill luck for you, boyo.” Then he gave Trell an odd look. “You…you could’ve opted out of our accord plenty of times back there, eh? But you didn’t. Why?”
Trell shrugged.
“No, no,” the pirate insisted, poking at him with his fag, “you deliberately stayed. Tell me why.”
Trell turned him a level gaze. “You have your Code, I have mine.”
Carian shook hi
s head. “I wouldn’t have done the same for you, Trell of the Tides.”
Trell smiled quietly to himself. “I know.” He lay back in the grass and gazed at the stars, his attention drawn for some reason to search out Cephrael’s Hand. He found the constellation floating just above the western horizon; strangely it looked as if it was rising instead of setting. “What do you know of Cephrael’s Hand, Carian? Any Nodefinder legends surrounding it?”
“Tons.” Carian turned to follow Trell’s eye to where the seven stars glowed. He flicked the dying butt of his fag off into the field. “But it’s Cephrael who always interested me rather more than the stars attributed to him.”
Trell tried to recall what he knew of Cephrael and found his education startlingly lacking considering how famous a personage he was. In fact, all he could remember about him came from the Rite for the Newly Departed. “‘Of gods in the known,” he quoted, “‘there remain only Cephrael and Epiphany, themselves immortal, the only true immortals, who were made in the Genesis to watch over this world…’” He turned Carian a sheepish look. “That’s all I remember.”
“Yeah, there’s a bit more to it,” the pirate remarked blandly. “Cephrael and Epiphany are brother and sister by all accounts. The Sobra I’ternin names them as angiel, the Maker’s blessed children.”
“What’s the Sobra I’ternin?”
“The manual for how to be an Adept. Everything we know about our race, about elae, comes from it, but only the first part has been deciphered. It’s written in patterns.”
Trell arched brows. “I didn’t realize patterns were a language unto themselves.” He tried to imagine the concept. It was hard to envision.
Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One Page 84
