Ean tried to reason through the situation, looking at everything that had happened and where it might be leading—
And a pattern flashed in his mind.
Not of elae, but of action and consequence, the spiraling threads of choices extending forward into possibility. He got the briefest glimpse of this pattern, of its paths of choices as yet unmade, yet it left a vivid residue of certainty of what would become. Ean was tempted to let things play on just to prove to himself the validity of the vision, to determine how far he’d glimpsed into future action.
In fact, he almost had to.
The pattern began with a choice—his choice—his step forward upon a specific path of consequence. Thinking no further than the surety of what he’d seen, Ean took that step.
He threw the second strand beneath his motion and in a heartbeat had the Avataren up against a wall and his sword at his throat. The giant’s eyes bulged—with surprise, wonder, the pressure of the fifth compressing his lungs, pinning him to rock more surely than Ean’s Merdanti blade? Probably all of them.
“Who paid you?” Ean growled in Avataren. He put the fourth into his question—the better to ensure the man’s veracity and quick reply.
The Avataren choked out, “She—”
His eyes went glassy in the same moment Ean heard a dull thock and saw three inches of a black spike suddenly protruding from the Avataren’s temple. Blood slowly drained into his dead eyes. Ean released the Avataren and spun, fast seeking the assassin. A blacker-than-black shadow vanished behind the lip of a roof.
Ean charged after it. He heard the Avataren’s body hit the ground even as he was running up a ramp of air. Just as his head cleared the roof, something careened off his fifth-strand shield—probably another of the same spikes that had claimed the Avataren.
Wind tore at the prince as he ran across the roof in pursuit of the assassin. Even as he watched, the man jumped an alley, landed on the next roof and rolled back to his feet with acrobatic ease, and kept running.
Ean put the second beneath his steps and leapt after him. Glancing down, the alley beneath his flying form appeared as a river of bronze to his elae-enhanced vision—the currents of the second strand. Ean landed on the next roof and kept chasing.
Above, the sky was solid darkness and boiling with thunder, but elae’s currents made the city bright to Ean’s eyes. The assassin darting across the rooftops appeared as a dark speck against an outline of gold.
The assassin leapt off a roof’s ledge and landed a story below on a lower rooftop. Rolling back to his feet, he turned as Ean was leaping after him and flung two more deadly darts. When they struck Ean’s fifth-strand shield, they caused an oddly clamorous resonance that he felt in his teeth.
Ean landed and kept running.
The figure sprinted for the edge, threw himself across another alley and tumbled to his feet on the roof of what could only be the Shadû el-Fnaa. The souk’s countless connected stalls and stores all shared the same roof, making an odd exoskeleton of ridges and angled tiles.
Ean flung the second beneath himself and became a flying shadow across the darkened street. He landed awkwardly and skidded sidelong down the tiles. The assassin was running along the spine of the souk, a dark outline against the darker night. Lightning flared, backlighting his form, and Ean threw a pattern.
The figure tumbled.
Ean darted after it, up and over the undulating rooftop, but when he reached the edge where he’d seen the figure fall, he saw only a darkened street hosting a promenade of shops.
Ean slung himself over the roof’s edge and landed in a cushion of the fifth. An easterly wind pushed at his back before tearing on down the promenade, shaking the near fig trees like a mother remonstrating a naughty child. Ean warily cast a pattern in search of the assassin just as lightning split the sky in a searing flash.
‘…The Prophet calls the lightning in his sleep…’
From the promenade, Ean had a clear view of the acropolis and its glowing temples. Even as he watched, another jagged streak cracked the firmament. Ozone charged through the air. Elemental energy slammed through the currents. Ean felt the molecules splitting, bombarding each other in their attempt to flee the Prophet’s furious slumber. He grunted. And I thought my dreams were bad.
A darkness streaked towards his head.
He reared back with an intake of breath, and a foot narrowly missed his jaw. The assassin wore black from head to toe; only her slanted eyes showed above a fitted mask—eyes he instantly recognized.
Immediately the foot struck for him again, faster than any mortal should be able to move. She bore after him in such a furious press that for a moment it was all Ean could do to stay out of her reach. Tumbling, spinning, twirling—one fist barely missed his nose before another fist or foot came flying at his head.
Whereupon, Ean realized that she had to be moving so fast by means of some form of innate timeweaving—like Gwynnleth when she’d fought the Whisper Lord back in Chalons-en-Les Trois. That’s why Ean couldn’t see any patterns associated with her movement—they were intrinsic to the patterns of her thoughts.
There were a hundred ways he could’ve wielded his power to end her life, but Ean wanted answers. He wanted to test his glimpsed pattern of cause and consequence.
Whenever Ean dreamed of Arion, he recovered some new trick that his former self had known. Now he called up Arion’s third-strand pattern—a matrix really, formed of the third and fifth woven together—and stepped off the world’s time-stream.
Suddenly he saw the assassin moving as slowly as if she was practicing the cortata at half speed. The faces of the Mages that Arion had slain superimposed themselves before the assassin’s hooded head, so that Ean felt like he walked time in two places at once. Behind him on that stream, Arion carved a path of death. Ahead of Ean lay a different pattern of consequence, yet somehow part of the same pattern.
In the next instant, he had his hand wrapped around her throat and a dagger poised at the back of her neck, just beneath her skull—a quick death, if it came to that. The assassin stilled with a sharp inhale.
“Whatever game you’re playing,” he said quietly, backing her into the alcove of a shop entrance, “you picked the wrong opponent.”
Her chest rose and fell with her rapid breath, and her slanted eyes grew even more narrow, dangerous. “Look down, Prince of Dannym.”
Ean glanced down between them and saw a curved silver blade in her hand, ready to eviscerate. He arched a brow.
She hissed and dropped the weapon, grabbing her wrist with her other hand. A burned palm radiated beneath the seared leather of her glove.
Ean gave her a razor smile. “The benefits of a prudent education.”
The curse she spat at him sounded uncomplimentary even in a foreign tongue.
He pinned her up against the wall with the fifth and pulled off her mask. As he’d expected, the Satrap of Pashmir’s agent glared blackly back at him. Without the voluminous layers of silk, she wasn’t but a wisp of a woman, barely stouter than the braid in her raven hair; but Ean had seen firsthand how deceptive was her impression of frailty.
At least he could assess with some certainty that she was not Avataren nobility. Her slanted eyes and oval-shaped face placed her clearly from the region of Malchiarr, or perhaps the eastern country of Vest, which also better explained her accent.
“Now…who are you?” Ean stepped back and crossed his arms. “What’s this all about?”
Pinned against the wall by the fifth, she glared venomously at him. Thunder sounded overhead in emphasis of her defiance.
Ean tightened his intention, and his fifth-strand bounds pressed her more firmly into the wall, eliciting a hiss of pain. “Why did you follow me? Why did you send those goons to attack me? Why did you want me to work elae?”
Her slanted dark eyes stared back in silence.
The prince shook his head, his own anger simmering. “Lady, you have no idea what I’m capable of. I’ve kept you a
live for some answers, but if you’re set on dying to protect your secrets—”
“Sheih.”
He tilted his head to regard her cautiously. “Shay…?”
“My name,” she snapped, “is Sheih.” Her dark eyes strayed to the promenade. “You should release me. Even now the shaytan’jinn will be coming.”
Shaytan’jinn? It was an Avataren word. “Demons?”
“They are a scourge, the Advisor’s personal army. Two weeks ago, my partner went to discuss a complicated matter with the Advisor and never came back.”
Ean followed her gaze towards the promenade. He knew well what would be coming for him soon enough, but how did this Sheih know about them?
He released her from his bands of the fifth but kept his own shield in place.
She stepped away from the wall and rubbed around the edges of her burned palm, radiating fury and something else…something indefinable; the currents were shouting it, but in a language Ean didn’t speak.
He ran a calculating gaze over her. “Shaytan’jinn…you speak of eidola.”
Sheih picked up her hood from where he’d dropped it on the ground. “I’ve been hunting them since my partner died.”
“Unsuccessfully, I gather.”
The venom in her gaze as she straightened could’ve felled an olyphaunt. “The Advisor only sends them to settle his vendettas, and I didn’t have any more partners to sacrifice.”
Ean thought he was starting to understand. “That’s why you wanted me to work elae. You made me bait for them.” Never mind that this had recently been his same intention.
Sheih arched a critical brow. “Nay, foolish prince. You became bait for the shaytan’jinn the moment you set foot in Tambarré.”
Ean studied her in silence. Some of her answers fit within the pattern of consequence he’d glimpsed, but quite a few strands of truth seemed to be missing from the whole. “How did you know I was a wielder?”
Sheih rolled her eyes. “Mercenaries talk, but Ascendants talk even more. Rumors out of the al-qasr say Prince Ean val Lorian severed the Prophet’s connection with one of his Marquiin. They say you killed the shaytan’jinn in Ivarnen. They say you can walk on air and turn stones to sand—they say many unbelievable things.”
“But you believed them?”
She snorted. “I believe the two hundred gold talents Dore Madden is offering for your head.” Sheih moved to the edge of the building and looked up and down the promenade. The howling wind was whipping the trees into a frenzy of flying leaves and rustling branches. “Now the Advisor will know it’s you.” Her tone revealed a hint of satisfaction. “Now he will send one of his demons, and I shall at last have my vengeance.”
Lady, you have no idea.
Sheih thought Dore would only send one eidola, but if he thought Ean was in the city—and how could he not, with the performance Ean had delivered on the currents that night?—he would unleash a wave of demons in pursuit.
Ean joined Sheih at the alcove’s edge. “We shouldn’t meet them here.”
She angled a brow upwards. “Them?”
Ean cast his gaze off through the storm, but really he was casting it along the currents, seeking a telltale disturbance that would alert to the eidola’s approach. “Is there somewhere else we can watch for them? Somewhere higher up?”
She regarded him circumspectly. Then she nodded. “Follow me, Prince of Dannym.”
Thirty-one
“We are none of us so rich as to afford the luxury of regret.”
–The Agasi wielder Markal Morrelaine
Björn van Gelderan landed lightly on the patio of his once-apartments in Illume Belliel, worked the trace seal on the glass-paned doors and slipped soundlessly inside Alshiba’s study. Closing the doors behind himself, he looked around.
The space had changed little from when he’d held residence there. It seemed the only real changes Alshiba had made were to remove anything that reminded her too nearly of him.
Gone was the armillary he’d kept upon his desk. Likewise a set of journals—she’d doubtless turned those in to the authorities ages ago. Björn smiled at the contemplation of a team of investigators scouring his rambling musings, looking for some proof of treason.
The room’s shelves and pedestals still displayed treasures from the Thousand Realms, tributes collected during his many centuries of service as the Alorin Seat. Alshiba had received some new tributes of her own as well, it appeared.
He moved on inside, scanning the room with his vigilant gaze, searching for patterns not of his own creation—for plenty of those remained. Yet what he saw most were the memories, ephemeral tracings layered upon one another as if a matrix of patterns—conversations, debates, sleepless nights, afternoons spent pacing, thinking, while the sun cast long, striated rays through the glass-paned doors. He saw faces, each connected to a series of events trailing into his lengthy past, and each a springboard into spirals of future consequence.
And he saw Alshiba, often in the periphery, sometimes in the background, rarely the central focus but never far from his side, or his thoughts, during those years. There was nothing fair about what he’d done to her. No way, really, to atone for it.
He walked to his desk—Alshiba’s desk—and ran his hand along the delicate wood, warm with the fresh sense of her. But underneath…the impression of his own lifeforce remained. The wood was saturated with it.
He’d laid preservation patterns throughout his home. They trapped more than time; they captured the lifeforce, energy bound to objects, objects bound to the time stream of the world’s consciousness. Each book on his shelf held an energistic history, every floor tile a tale—or several. The mansion was clogged with the detritus of his thoughts, impressions, emotions…desires.
Never mind the armillary, how could Alshiba stand all the rest of it?
The currents in the room were calm, which meant that whatever malicious craft was being worked against Alshiba likely remained dormant until she appeared. Instinct told him they’d planted some kind of atrophae, or cursed object, created with mor’alir patterns designed to bring harm or illness. An atrophae could be formed of anything into which a pattern could be indelibly inscribed. Any one of the treasures in the room could’ve been atrophae. Many of the common items, too.
Björn started with the newest objects and began systematically working his way through the room, laying his hands on everything, permeating them with his thoughts, searching for patterns within their construction. That he could see patterns made this task much easier, though no less time-intensive, considering the number of items in the room.
The sun made lengthy progress in its trek through the heavens while he was conducting this inspection. He was fully prepared to stop time while he checked every item in every room of the mansion, but he found what he was looking for in a crystal goblet, one of a set aligned beside a corked bottle of wine. She very likely drank from the goblet every day.
Björn felt the sizzle of mor’alir the moment his fingers touched the crystal. He lifted it to the light and saw patterns etched throughout, though they would be invisible to anyone lacking his particular variant trait.
Two layers bound the glass. The patterns forming the first layer of the atrophae were attuned to elae’s first strand and would activate when touched by an Adept of that strand. The patterns of the second layer were designed to disrupt the same.
Every time Alshiba came within range of the goblet, it would activate like a tuning fork, but one that emitted a deadly, draining hum. The goblet was effectively cutting Alshiba off from elae’s first strand—a twice poison, for her Healer’s nature drew heavily on this creative lifeforce. Over time, she would wither, sicken and grow ill. A cunning and completely untraceable means of eliminating her.
Björn exhaled a slow breath. His cobalt gaze grew hard. A mor’alir Adept had crafted this deadly gift—and expertly so. He recalled watching Alshiba drink wine from that very goblet the last time he’d paid her a visit.
&nbs
p; Ah…Alshiba, my love. I never meant for things to come to this.
Björn looked over the crystal again, studying its construction. Then he drew upon the fifth to shape his intent. The goblet shimmered, seemed to refract the light differently for an instant, and then solidified back into form with a faint chime, now without its hidden patterns. Björn set it back on the sideboard.
He might’ve removed the goblet altogether, but it would be a simple thing for the perpetrator to plant another atrophae if he found his first one missing. Better he thought his noxious gift still active.
Björn returned to his inspection of the room.
He found four more atrophae before he was finished. Each one he altered and left where it lay.
He would need to come back and check the entire mansion. He would need to spend more time in Illume Belliel than he’d anticipated. Atrophae were like poison; even after he’d found and destroyed them all, Alshiba would be weak and in need of Healing. And he knew too well the type of predators circling her in wait, watching for any weakness. There were several obvious hyenas hungering on the fringes, but lions, too, of this he was certain.
Björn exhaled a slow breath and set down the last of the atrophae he’d unworked. Alshiba hating him was a consequence he could live with, but something happening to her as a result of him was not.
The currents swelled faintly, the ripple of a familiar presence approaching.
Björn walked to a cabinet and plucked two lowball glasses off the shelf. Then he reached into a space that appeared to be empty and withdrew a cut crystal decanter, half full with an amber liquid.
He cast a whisper of the fifth to close the cabinet doors and was striding across the room, making for the patio, when his eyes caught upon a marble King’s board with pieces frozen in play.
For a moment, he stared at it.
Then a smile touched his lips.
It was the last game he’d been playing before leaving Illume Belliel on that fateful night when everything had gone awry. He wondered why Alshiba had left the game as it was—surely this, of anything, would’ve reminded her of him.
Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4) Page 44
