Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  “With the Warlock.” Pelas would’ve preferred that his tone hadn’t sounded so grim.

  Nadia caught her breath. “Sinárr took Tanis?”

  “I’m afraid so, Princess.”

  Tanis notwithstanding, they had bigger problems at the moment. Dark shapes were appearing out of the fog. One in particular captured Pelas’s attention.

  Shail solidified into view carrying his Merdanti blade with the point held low. He wore fighting leathers instead of his usual silk robes, but he hadn’t changed his condescending smile. “If you weren’t so predictable, Pelas, the process of schooling you would be much more rewarding.”

  Pelas eyed his younger brother while working the muscles of his jaw. He should’ve anticipated that Sinárr and Shail would come after them. He should’ve expected they would use Shadow to do it. By Chaos born—he should’ve at least tried to understand the voice that had been whispering ill tidings in Tanis’s thoughts!

  “Predictability has its place,” Pelas remarked while trying to think of a way of escape that wouldn’t imperil Nadia. “It’s difficult to fight your enemies if you can’t find them.”

  “That’s precisely my point, Pelas.” Shail idly spun his blade as he continued his approach. “You claim your only endgame is stopping mine, yet what hubris to even conceive of the notion when you’re so shortsighted.” He stopped before them and settled his condescending gaze on Nadia. “Did you really think I would just let you go, Princess?”

  Nadia tried to inch away from him. Pelas tightened his arm around her shoulders, but he knew their chances of escaping together were slim. He had no recourse to his power while Shail controlled the framework of the Shadow-space they were occupying.

  Shail arched a brow in cold humor and returned his eyes to his brother. Then his gaze tightened. “What have you done for the last three hundred years, Pelas?” He emphasized this question with a swirl of his blade and began walking a circle around them.

  Pelas followed him with his eyes. “Was that a rhetorical question?”

  “I’ll tell you what you’ve done.” Shail speared him with a contemptuous glare. “You’ve squandered your time dallying with frilly-frocked natives, immortalizing their pathetic efforts with bits of colored mud.”

  “That’s somewhat of a generalization—”

  “And Darshan…” Shail snorted as he passed behind Pelas. “He’s spent all of his time dwelling in religious fantasy, stroking off on the erection of purpose.” Suddenly his voice was close at Pelas’s ear, his blade sharp at his back. “But ask me what I have been doing.”

  Pelas saw too nearly his many errors in misestimating his younger brother. He replied in a low voice, “What have you been doing, Shailabanáchtran?”

  “Studying.” Shail made the word speak with ominous implications. “Learning. Piecing together the fragmented truths of this realm’s pitiful history into a pattern by which I may rule it—and all of the Realms of Light.”

  “No one can fault you for ambition.” Pelas shifted his eyes to gaze tightly at the other shapes that were emerging from the fog.

  There were two races of eidola: the ones made out of men from the Realms of Light, and the kind constructed whole-cloth from the aether of Shadow.

  The eidola of Shadow were also of two natures: those bound to Warlocks as active harvesters of power, and the ones the Warlocks had discarded, remnant entities that had once inhabited the worlds the Warlocks had fashioned; entities that had taken on some form and shape through the centuries but hadn’t enough of their own essence to sustain themselves once the Warlocks moved on to more interesting fare. Vampiric creatures, these revenants would latch onto and feed off of anything that held a spark of life within it.

  The ones coming towards him now were very definitely the latter. There were at least a hundred, and they all had their black eyes fixed firmly on him.

  Shail followed Pelas’s gaze with his own and said low into his ear, “Word has it that revenants can feed off an immortal for ten thousand centuries before he becomes too weak to sustain them.”

  Pelas was really wishing he’d thought to bring his sword. “So I’ve been told. I can’t imagine anyone volunteered to test the theory.”

  “It will be another first for you, brother.” Shail moved around to face Pelas again, his smile blending venom with contempt. Then he shifted his gaze to Nadia, and his expression sobered. “The princess, however, will be coming with me.”

  Nadia caught her breath.

  A silent stream of invective charged through Pelas’s mind. He had no weapon that would help him against his brother, and he couldn’t work deyjiin within the frame of Shail’s space. And then there were the revenants to contend with. He’d never be able to escape them while also trying to protect Nadia.

  Oh, Tanis, forgive me what I must do…

  Pelas took Nadia’s wrists and handed her forward.

  “No!” She flung a desperate look at him, her colorless eyes pleading, why?

  He pushed his mouth against her ear. “Whatever happens, I will find you.”

  Then Shail was pulling her into the circle of his own arm. She struggled, but so might a butterfly endeavor against a hawk.

  Shail looked Nadia over, and his smile widened.

  Pelas ground his teeth. “Shail—”

  “Now, you needn’t worry for the princess, Pelas. I have something special in mind for her.” He licked a razor gaze over her again.

  Knowing his brother’s sense of humor, Pelas imagined he knew exactly what Shail planned to do with Nadia.

  Shail’s dark eyes were gleaming with malicious amusement as he lifted his gaze back to Pelas. “This is an intriguing predicament. Do you seek your paramour through the endless universes of Shadow, or save his lady love from her own bleak fate? And time…time is ever against you, Pelas.” Shail glanced to the whitewashed sky. “Even here, where time can be molded readily to our will, you haven’t an infinity of it—for Sinárr can hardly restrain himself when it comes to Tanis, and Nadia…” he shifted his gaze to look her over hungrily again, “let’s just say the sands are falling in her hourglass as well.”

  Nadia tried to pull away from him, but he clutched her so tightly against his side in return that her face constricted with pain.

  “For all that your meddling is irksome, Pelas, I do enjoy seeing you scramble as a result,” Shail remarked then. “I did warn you that you’d be out of your depth.”

  Pelas clenched his jaw. The revenants were less than twenty paces away. He could feel their hunger radiating more coldly than the air of Shail’s frozen world. “So I recall.”

  Shail looked his brother over one last time. “Well…I’ll leave you to your experience.”

  A silver-violet line split the air. Shail barely gave the portal time to widen before he stepped in, dragging Nadia with him.

  Pelas looked to the revenants.

  Their black eyes were ravenous.

  He had time for one clear thought. Then they swarmed him.

  Thirteen

  “A man cannot be too discriminating in the choice of his enemies.”

  –The Adept truthreader Thrace Weyland

  Viernan hal’Jaitar stood at a tall window in the Castle of Ivarnen, looking out over a broad and scenic estuary while Dore Madden threw a tantrum in the next room.

  Like Tambarré and other of Dore’s acquisitions for the Prophet, Ivarnen had been a center of learning during the reign of the Cyrene Empire, but more germane to Dore’s interests, it had also been a base for the Quorum of the Sixth Truth, that coalition of fifth-strand wielders who dominated the realm in the times known as The Before.

  Built atop a mountainous isle in the middle of the Enduil Estuary in Saldaria, the fortress retained the elegance of a bygone era. Somewhere deep within the lowest passages of Ivarnen, perhaps among the flooded caverns riddling the island’s core, the Quorum were rumored to have held their dark rituals. Researchers of Quorum lore believed the Order’s sacred archives remained in
tact somewhere, possibly at Ivarnen.

  Whatever Dore’s true motivations for acquiring the fortress, the maze of subterranean caverns beneath the restored castle fulfilled the man’s insatiable appetite for private spaces in which to work his twisted experiments.

  Viernan hal’Jaitar loathed Dore Madden and his Prophet lord; he loathed that M’Nador needed their aid, and most of all, he loathed how readily Dore took advantage of M’Nador’s weaknesses.

  Since their new accord struck in Tal’Shira, the man had increasingly imposed upon Viernan to attend his company, as though the chains that bound them in their political troth bound them also into camaraderie.

  One might’ve witnessed these invitations and thought Dore had taken Viernan into his confidence, but Viernan knew the truth: Dore Madden had such a chokehold on him that he no longer cared what wildly vicious and despicable plans of his Viernan overheard. Viernan was the moth with its wing beneath Dore’s finger, and they both knew it.

  Oh, but Dore’s most recent summons couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time. Viernan felt part of himself still sitting at his desk, staring at eleven words that had burned themselves into his mind, his thoughts, his core, his eyes forever etched with the script of their delivery: invasion at Darroyhan!...prisoner rescued…the enchantress fallen…Dragon…zanthyr…mutiny…

  His agent might’ve written only those words and Viernan would’ve understood the whole of it. Verily, instinct had warned him to distance himself from Trell val Lorian while he’d still held the prince in Tal’Shira. Even so, Viernan hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly right in his suppositions.

  A Sundragon and a zanthyr had come to rescue the prince? Viernan admitted himself rather intrigued to learn how Trell had garnered the support of such immortal creatures. But immortal support at least accounted for his unaccountable luck. Countless times Viernan had personally tipped the prince into a raging surf, only to find him rescued off the shores of impossibility. Was the man actually blessed of a god?

  Now Darroyhan was a shambles, Viernan had lost a valuable interrogator in his daughter Taliah, and he’d lost Trell—again. Just as needling was learning that one of his captains had stolen a boat and mutinied, along with his company. The one grace that had come from Darroyhan’s fall was ridding himself of the Prophet’s eidola spies.

  Now, instead of tending to his own important affairs—like tracking down the recalcitrant val Lorian prince before he could act against M’Nador’s interests—there he stood while Dore Madden carried on with Niko van Amstel about matters that had nothing to do with M’Nador and everything to do with Dore’s personal vendettas and obsessions. The man really was as mad as Malachai. Yet in his fervent race towards lunacy, Dore evidently ran neck and neck with Niko.

  It was painful listening to the two of them ranting on entirely different subjects—clearly not even sharing the same seditious conversation. If he was forced to listen to them much longer, Viernan feared he’d soon go mad as well.

  “We have to do something about her, Dore.” Niko’s plaintive voice was as grating as a raven cawing outside the window. “I mean, what has she done, really? I mean, what does she do?”

  “Do? What we must do is destroy the accursed man!” Dore spoke with the clipped and rapid diction he often employed while pacing, as if the meter of his feet must match the meter of his speech. “He’s Returned, damn him to thirteen hells. Niko—do you hear my words?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t do anything. That’s my point.”

  “Which is precisely why we must.” Dore growled an oath under his breath. “Never mind his persistent, pernicious destroying of the Prophet’s eidola—in our very backyard, under our very noses!—but I tell you, he stole Işak’getirmek from me, and that cannot go unpunished. No, Niko—Niko, listen to me: Arion must be punished!” the word came out in a venomous hiss.

  Despite himself, a morbid curiosity drew Viernan over to the archway separating the rooms. In the drawing room beyond, Dore was pacing before a limestone mantel, while Niko sat slumped in a low-backed Saldarian chair with his long legs splayed across the carpet.

  The latter sighed petulantly. “I can’t see how punishing Ean val Lorian will help depose Alshiba.”

  Dore eyed him sharply. He was walking with his shoulders slumped forward and his hands behind his back, looking not unlike an opossum pacing in a cage. “Oh, but he is deserving…yes, so deserving. You have no idea how deserving, Niko.”

  “Alshiba is deserving. I’ll grant you that.” Niko sank his chin onto one hand. Then he lifted it again and straightened. “But—did you say Arion?”

  Dore slung a finger at him. “Arion Tavestra is an abomination!”

  Niko scratched his head and sank dispiritedly back in his chair again. “I thought he was dead. What did you say about Arion?”

  “I said he’s Returned, you slow-witted fop.”

  “Arion was…well, he was the best of us, wasn’t he?” Niko picked at a fraying thread on the arm of his chair. Then he frowned. “Arion could be a problem if he wasn’t dead.”

  “He will die. He has to die—and her…” Dore’s face twisted with a grimace, as if reliving an unpleasant memory.

  Viernan wondered absently what might constitute a pleasant memory for Dore Madden, but then he realized he would really rather not know.

  “She must die soon, but not quickly…” Dore quivered like a thin blade. “No…not quickly.”

  Niko hit his fist against the arm of his chair. “That’s what I’ve been saying! We have to get rid of Alshiba.”

  “And Ean val Lorian.” Dore cast Niko a fearsome glare. “But how to do it? Tyr’kharta, Tal’Afaq, here at Ivarnen…he’s escaped all my traps, just like Arion…but they cannot escape me every time. Balance must eventually intervene.” He rubbed his hands together slowly. “We’ll cast the net wider. The whole world will be looking for Ean val Lorian. He must pay the cost of the Prophet’s Marquiin, of our lost eidola…” his eyes went glassy and he slowly ran his tongue along spidery lips, “my lost Işak’getirmek.”

  “Alshiba is a wielder. That’s part of the problem.” Niko shifted discontentedly in his chair. “We have to be careful how we go about eliminating her.” His lower lip jutted slightly as he thought this through. “You need to handle this, Dore. I named Franco Rohre as my deputy, like you told me to do, but now she’s calling him to attend her in Illume Belliel and making me do all the work here in Alorin. Franco Rohre isn’t even a vestal!”

  Abruptly Dore spun to him. “You cannot move against Franco until you get the map. Do you have it? Do you have Dagmar’s weldmap?”

  Niko glowered. “No.”

  Dore’s black eyes shone with dark determination. “Much depends upon it. You must make Franco collect it from the Second Vestal.”

  Niko shot him a churlish glare. “How am I supposed to do that when he’s spending all of his time in Illume Belliel with Alshiba and I’m stuck down here? Anyway, Franco doesn’t trust me, and neither does Alshiba—she flat out told me I can’t order Franco to do anything until I sit the Vestal Seat. I’m telling you, Dore, something has to be done about her!”

  “Did you give her the items I gave to you? Did you?”

  “Yes,” Niko grumbled.

  “Then you must wait. That is all.” Dore resumed his pacing.

  Niko gave a dramatic exhale and plucked petulantly at his chair arm again. “To see how little Alshiba has accomplished in three centuries, one would think the vestals were as indolent as the nobility. But it’s so much work.”

  “We have our work cut out for us, yes, but Ean val Lorian cannot escape us forever. Mark my words, Niko.”

  “But how has her incompetence escaped everyone’s notice for so long? Just tell me that.” Niko pushed abruptly out of his chair. “The realm is dying, our Adepts aren’t Returning, the Fifth and Second Vestals have been missing for centuries—centuries, Dore! And now Raine D’Lacourte has gone missing as well?” He flung up a hand. “You’d think s
omeone would’ve at least remarked upon it. Questioned her qualifications to hold the Seat…something.”

  Dore spun on his heel and started pacing in the other direction. “A new trap. That’s what we need. Oh, but it must be sophisticated. Yes, very elaborate, this trap for the magnificent Arion Tavestra.”

  Niko turned him a confused look. “I thought you were hunting Ean val Lorian.”

  Dore waved him off. “No matter, no matter, we will have them both.”

  Niko arched brows. “Impressive.”

  “Yes, the realm will be on fire for our val Lorian prince, and then…yes, then we’ll draw him to us like a fish on a line.”

  “That’s what we need, Dore. You’ve hit it. We’ve got to find some way to draw Dagmar to us—never mind Franco. We don’t need Franco if we can get our hands on Dagmar and deal with Alshiba at the same time.”

  “Oh, we’ll deal…we’ll deal such a hand that our Arion can’t help but play in our game. Pinch points—” he snapped his fingers, “that’s what we’ll use. We’ll find the prince’s pinch points and squeeze them until the little pustule pops. And when we finally have him oozing in our hands…” Dore’s spidery lips spread with the rictus that passed for his smile, “then we shall break him like we broke his brother. Oh—oh, my yes! Just think of it, Niko. The great Arion Tavestra strapped on my table, soon to become my newest puppet…” His gaze darkened with something so abominable that Viernan had to turn away.

  “Viernan, what say you?” Niko looked to Viernan as he was trying to purge Dore Madden’s expression from his mind. “Is not the time to replace all of our vestals long overdue?”

  Viernan shifted a black gaze to Niko. It was a grave indignity being forced to attend Niko van Amstel and Dore Madden for a legitimate reason, much less to stand and observe this lunacy. “I do not see the need for vestals at all.”

  Niko drew back his head like a startled tortoise. “Now…now let’s not be hasty, Viernan. I’m to be a vestal, after all, and the Seat soon thereafter—you’ll see. It’s all arranged. When I’m in power, things will change. When I have all the power….well, you’ll see, Viernan.” Niko gave him one of his insincere smiles. “Great changes will follow.”