Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Her heart was suddenly beating faster for knowing what she’d done. Bonded with a Marquiin! She managed a dry swallow and focused back on him. “Can you…” she indicated his silk shroud, “will you take it off?”

  “It is forbidden.” Yet he was reaching to unhook the clasps at the back of his head even as he said the words.

  As Caspar pulled the silk forward, his dark hair spilled forth. The shroud slid away to reveal deep-set eyes framing a slender nose, followed by a squared chin and jaw. The almond shape of his eyes and his accent indicated his origins lay far to the east. The Marquiin tattoos darkened his eyelids, brow and temples with thorny whorls. When he lifted his eyes, his irises were a murky grey where they should’ve been colorless.

  Caspar let out a slow breath and met Nadia’s gaze. Through the intensity of his stare and the shared space of his thoughts, an understanding passed between them. She kenned that he’d thrown that grappling hook consciously, if without hope—he’d had no hope of his effort actually working, what with elae’s touch nearly lost to him—yet she’d caught it. She had secured the private bond he’d so desperately sought of her and had connected their minds, offering hers as a sort of refuge.

  Well…she’d done more reckless things in her life. But not many.

  Nadia wondered for the hundredth time why the Prophet had left her with access to her gifts.

  Because you’re no threat to him. Caspar’s thought reached her clearly within the part of her mind they now shared.

  Nadia studied him intently. Her hands were shaking, her heart still beating fast. This was an audacious and foolhardy gambit they’d just embarked upon together.

  Then the reality of their plight struck home to her, and tears stung her eyes. She gave him a pleading look of apology. I can offer you nothing!

  He smiled a little. Only hope.

  Nadia knew how slight a chance that was. Her brow furrowed deeply as she looked at him. A slim one.

  His smile inched a fraction wider. When I woke this morning, I had none.

  Nadia searched his face with her gaze. The tattoos around his eyes were clearly patterns, but not like any she’d ever seen. She drew in a deep breath and said aloud, partly in the hopes of calming her racing heart, “How long have you been…like this?”

  Caspar removed the neck clasp of his shroud and shook out his hair. Dark locks fell just above his shoulders. He pushed long strands back from his face with both hands. “I was the last one.” He plucked his fingers free of their gloves, one finger at a time, and looked up at her beneath his brows. “I think the Prophet chose me because of my resemblance to Kjieran van Stone.”

  Nadia knew that name. Tanis had told her that the King of Dannym’s truthreader had vanished without explanation, an unconscionable act from a ringed truthreader in the service of a monarch. She had suspected from the first that Kjieran had been sent on some clandestine mission—more so after hearing that the Fourth Vestal Raine D’Lacourte sometimes played advisor to Dannym’s king.

  She’d expressed as much to Tanis then, and now here Caspar was speaking Kjieran’s name in association with the Prophet Bethamin. It couldn’t be coincidence. But what did Kjieran van Stone have to do with Caspar becoming Marquiin?

  “I’m sorry.” She pressed two fingers to her forehead in protest of the buzzing energy field in front of her as much as the chaos storm still howling at the fringes of her thoughts. “I don’t understand the connection.”

  Caspar held his gaze steady upon her. “They say Kjieran was the Prophet’s favorite acolyte, one of the few of us he never made Marquiin.”

  She caught the intimation in his tone. “Then what did happen to him?”

  Caspar regarded her warily. “The Prophet made him…something else.”

  “Caspar,” she begged forgiveness with her gaze, “you’ll have to speak more candidly if I’m meant to understand. I know nothing of these events.”

  He considered her for a moment with his brow slightly furrowed and his lips pressed together, perhaps deciding if he dared venture the story, or even determining if he could bear to tell it.

  After a time, he turned his head in profile to her. “A few months ago, the Prophet called me to attend him. I was newly arrived, still sick from being held below decks during a rough voyage, chained with goracrosta.” He gave a pained grimace, dropped his gaze to his hands and his voice to the threadbare volume of confession. “First the Prophet took me to his bed. Soon after, he made me…this.” He closed his eyes, and Nadia saw his larynx lift and fall with a swallow. “I still don’t know if he meant it as a punishment or a patron gift.”

  Nadia tried to keep the horror from her expression, but she feared she was failing badly.

  “No more of us has he made since then.” Caspar looked back to her with a grave hollowness behind his gaze. “I don’t understand what’s happened to him.”

  These words made her afraid without knowing why. “What do you mean?”

  Caspar fingered the gloves in his hands with his brows pinched together. “The Prophet has changed.”

  “How has he changed?”

  He stared off, working the muscles of his jaw. “For a while there was just talk—wild and unlikely stories that the Prophet was turning new initiates away, speculation that he would make no more Marquiin.” He looked back to her. “The temple is always rife with gossip concerning the Prophet’s possible intentions. No one understands him. Everyone fears him. There’s no logic to who he takes to his bed, no reason to who survives such encounters, or who he’ll damn into this hellish existence. So I didn’t believe the gossip until…” Caspar dropped his gaze. “That day I first came to see you, Princess—on that day, the Prophet summoned me to his chambers, and there…” he clenched his jaw and seemed to struggle with the words. “There…he laid his hands on me, and…”

  Nadia held her breath.

  Caspar looked away along the wavering line of the energy field. “It was like he drew the madness out of me. It hurt so desperately, I thought—at first, I thought he was draining all the blood from my veins. But then a clarity returned to my mind that I’d forgotten could exist.” He focused an intense look back at her. “Then he told me what he desired and sent me to you.”

  Nadia stared at him. “He made you sane again? Why? For what possible purpose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She heard the fear behind this statement and decided not to pursue more questions in that direction. “But now you say it’s true? He’s making no more Marquiin?”

  Caspar sank slowly down the wall to sit on the floor. Nadia followed him onto her knees, gazing concernedly at him.

  “‘Things are not what they seemed.’” Caspar turned her a look. “This is all he spoke in explanation for the grave injustice he’d done me, in apology for destroying everything—” Caspar’s voice broke and he pushed palms to his eyes. After a moment, he continued barrenly, “But I heard what he meant in his way of speaking to us, his Marquiin…speaking his thoughts as entire thoughts complete, without words, like shoving the whole choking melon down your throat with his fist buried in it. He means to make no more of us.”

  Nadia asked as gently as she could, “Did he say why?”

  Caspar draped his arms across bent knees and rested his head back against the wall. “He never says why.”

  Nadia laid her palm upon the wall, close to the barrier, her only means of conveying the sympathetic touch she so wished to offer him. After a moment, Caspar aligned his hand on the wall parallel to hers. A hair-thin barrier of energized death separated their fingers.

  His eyes sought hers. What do we do now, Nadia?

  Oh, what irony that her captor was looking to her as his only any chance of freedom! Now? She exhaled a slow breath, finding courage somehow in his unexpected trust, and a renewed sense of faith within her troth to save him. Now we wait.

  Twenty-nine

  “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  –Tannour Valeri of Vest

&nbs
p; Light seared into Pelas’s mind like the midday sun hitting his closed eyelids—blindingly bright, even through the gentle shield of unconsciousness. He shocked back into awareness with a gasped breath, inhaling that plane’s cold, thin air along with a powerful sense of—

  Tanis!

  Pelas perceived the lad through the sun that was Sinárr’s glowing presence; the Warlock filled his own universe, but Tanis was a bright star within it. Reaching out along the bond, Pelas swam fast towards Tanis’s star.

  Framed space shifted in turning cubes, crossing and overlapping—Sinárr’s, Shail’s, Pelas’s own space intersected and held for a breath of time as Pelas’s bond to Tanis opened a tunnel of communication through colliding universes. The lad’s location became suddenly very clear to Pelas, but reaching him…

  Pelas drew energy through his bond with Tanis—drew energy from Sinárr by extension—and tried to anchor his awareness in a new context of space, outside of the plane Shail had trapped him in. Pelas sent his mind swimming up through circles of space, seeking a new position in the void’s infinite pool.

  Just as he perceived the surface of Shail’s framed space and was throwing out new starpoints—

  Sinárr severed the connection.

  Space collapsed.

  Pelas tumbled violently back down into a starless plane of writhing darkness: the revenants encasing him. They glommed to his body so densely as to mimic a planet’s newly forming core.

  Now the pain of their feeding needled into every part of his form. Pelas swallowed back a welling frustration and tried to focus through the pain, tried to anchor his awareness enough to assess what he’d just experienced.

  He sensed an important truth in that chance reconnection with Tanis, hints of a way to escape, but pain had him trapped in its jaws and demanded all of his attention instead. He tried to think of other things.

  Thinking was painful.

  He drew a curtain with his attention and huddled inside it, as a child behind the drapes cloaking a dark window. Concentration came slowly and with a great force of will. He impatiently watched it approaching down the road of his thoughts, the bobbing lantern of lucidity growing brighter but at the agonizing pace of a snail.

  No, a snail would’ve beaten it to his door.

  Connection.

  At last it came to him. That was the key. He’d been able to use his bond to Tanis to tap into Sinárr’s power, because their lifeforces were all currently connected—himself and Tanis via the Unbreakable Bond, Tanis and Sinárr for as long as the Warlock held the lad in Shadow.

  Pelas saw the simplicity then, the key to his escape. He and his brothers were bound, as he and Tanis were bound. But did he dare attempt to draw upon his connection to either of his brothers?

  Darshan’s mind would be too far from his reach. Alorin’s substance formed a dense barrier between their minds; he wouldn’t be able to penetrate it without his own power—and it was power he would be seeking through the bond. But Shail…somehow Shail still held extant starpoints in Shadow; he was still framing the space in which he had Pelas trapped. Thus he had to have kept a portal open somewhere to allow the continuing connection.

  Which meant…

  The revenant horde started undulating again. Pelas knew he had only a breath of time before they began their next feeding and drained his consciousness along with his lifeforce.

  He quickly sought Shail’s mind as he would’ve if they’d been roaming Chaos together. After a lengthy time that showed him just how much the revenants had already drained his lifeforce, he at last perceived Shail’s mind—similar to the way he still perceived Tanis’s. Both connections were distant and indistinct, pinpoint stars of the faintest dark glimmer.

  But Pelas didn’t need to contact his brother; he only needed to use the bond they shared to siphon some of Shail’s energy for his own use, enough to call someone else to his aid. Someone closer by.

  Closer. As if the word held any relevance in Shadow, where an infinity of beings might occupy the same space—for in Shadow, space only existed between the points each immortal himself framed.

  Pelas drew powerfully upon his bond with Shail, with all the force of his will. It felt like sucking energy through a straw longer than the circumference of the world. Finally he succeeded in gaining the slightest prickling of deyjiin, a mere whisper of breath.

  The revenants were writhing now…coiling, blanketing him, clutching all about his form. He felt what little energy he’d accumulated rapidly draining away and lassitude rushing in again to fill the vacuum left by its departure. With desperate will, Pelas cast forth an image into the void, a card of calling to summon another Warlock. It was pure thought; it had no energy, so it couldn’t be trapped by Shail’s starpoints, but it had energy behind its impetus.

  Then the pain of the revenants’ feeding grew too bitingly intense, and Pelas surrendered to the darkness once more.

  Thirty

  “He shouldn’t feel such obligation to keep sacrificing himself for a troth another man made.”

  –The Shade Creighton Khelspath, on Ean val Lorian

  Ean walked the crowded corridors of Tambarré’s Shadû el-Fnaa market, marveling at the wonders offered in the City-Within-the-Stone. Part covered bazaar, part local meeting ground, the maze of stalls, shops, stands, stores, and showrooms—all comprising the same connected warren that was the Shadû el-Fnaa—easily covered a quarter of Tambarré’s Lower City.

  Beneath the souk’s bamboo roof, one could find mosaic pottery, chiseled metal lanterns, and stall after stall of silver and pewter teapots with curving spouts. Huge ceramic urns overflowed with dried fruits and nuts, or were piled high with an ochre-hued rainbow of spices. Olives filled vats like the treasure hoard of pirates; onions and garlic hung in draped garlands. Kaftans, jeweled slippers and bolts of fabric were stacked in stalls; leather goods of every conceivable make cluttered the air space, while enormous woven carpets and animal skins hung from ceiling beams.

  The souk offered a dizzying display of color and texture to accost every sense, and all with the accompanying shouting and bartering of shopkeepers eager to make their next sale.

  Within the Shadû’s warren of covered streets and shadowed alleys, mercenaries strolled behind Tambarréan aristocrats swathed in colorful, billowing silks. They in turn followed in the footsteps of Bemothi traders, discerned by their bejeweled turbans as much as the wicked sabers at their belts. Vestian merchants, with their ominous black veils strung with gold coins, and Dheanainn sailors with pierced ears and brows argued with Avataren slave traders, whose shaved and tattooed heads reminded Ean uncomfortably of Bethamin’s Ascendants.

  Oddly, the latter were notable mainly for their absence, there in a city now known more for its al-qasr—the local name for the temple complex that crowned the Tambarré acropolis—than for the trading hub it had been for millennia.

  ‘You’ll want to enter Tambarré through the node in the Lower City…’

  Ean understood now why Sebastian had suggested that route, for the node had spit him out in a crowded plaza facing the Shadû el-Fnaa’s elaborate arched entrance, an open invitation to blend in and disappear.

  He’d quickly procured new clothing in the Tambarréan style—an embroidered kaftan, turban and cloak of indigo blue over matching desert pants—but for a stroll in the Shadû el-Fnaa, he needn’t have worried. The place was so jammed with the representatives of different races, languages, dialects and cultures that even his fighting blacks wouldn’t have drawn a curious eye.

  Ean wore his turban with the hanging end draped across his features, and he viewed his surroundings through the veil of elae’s currents, alert to patterns that might be attuned to detect an Adept of his particular ilk. But though he assessed his surroundings with a cautious eye, he couldn’t quite keep the wonder out of his gaze.

  He came to a covered plaza where vendors had set up food stands. Café tables and chairs were set all about a central fountain, whose watery music could barely be
heard beneath the louder counterpoint of diverse languages. From one of the vendors, Ean bought besṭila, a meat pie of layered pastry filled with a mixture of ground almonds, eggs and saffron-infused chicken, the whole of it covered in a rare confectioner’s sugar. He retreated to the deeper shadows edging the crowded square and watched the goings on while he ate.

  Sebastian had drawn a map of the city for him, but Ean still got lost three times before he found his way out of the honeycombed alleys of the souk. Midday had arrived by that time. After spending the morning beneath the souk’s shaded corridors, the high Saldarian sun felt too bright to Ean’s eyes.

  All around him spread high walls of sandstone, their soft sides carved or stippled into the intricate designs so gloried by the desert kingdoms. And towering over everything, visible from nearly anywhere in the city, the mounding acropolis, ringed by a mile of crenellated sandstone wall, topped by an impressive complex of temples and palaces built first by the Quorum of the Sixth Truth and now home to the Prophet Bethamin.

  Ean found his way to a plaza that offered an unimpeded view of the acropolis. While he refilled his flagons, he stared up at the imposing forty-foot walls, with the sun beating down on him from directly above and sweat trickling down his back.

  ‘…those tricks you performed to get us into Ivarnen…don’t try them in Tambarré…’

  They’d spent hours collaborating on ways to enter the temple that didn’t rely on his talent, yet now, having seen the place for himself, all of their ideas seemed inadequate. Nevertheless, Ean was committed to the path. He knew the effect he needed to achieve in Tambarré. Now it was a matter of remaining dauntless on his path until he achieved it.

  Unfortunately, at the moment, dauntless was feeling a lot like uncertainty.

  The prince headed off to seek a higher vantage from which he might view the acropolis and its many temples. Surprisingly he encountered few of Bethamin’s minions about the town. Ean knew the Prophet didn’t actually rule Saldaria, but he’d still envisioned Tambarré as a rat’s nest of Ascendants and Marquiin. The city’s only infestation, however, appeared to be feral cats.