Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  He threw out his arms and lifted a grin to the heavens. “Sebastian, Dareios—it worked!” His cry echoed back to him from the plaza’s arcades, a hundredfold disembodied congratulations.

  Suddenly he heard a commotion coming from the shadowed side of the tower. Had an eidola escaped his working? Success put power beneath his steps as he ran to investigate, but as he rounded the tower…

  Sheih had one of the creatures pinned beneath her and was trussing it in goracrosta. A few more pieces of that first glimpsed pattern of consequence finally slid into place.

  Ean watched her skillfully trying the creature and felt a cold foreboding settle over him. She’d claimed she wanted vengeance. Ean had assumed that meant killing the creatures who’d killed her partner. He’d never imagined she wanted to capture a living one.

  “Release that thing and step away from it, Sheih.”

  Sheih froze with her fingers mid a knot. After a moment’s pause, she continued tying it off. “This isn’t what it looks like, Ean.”

  Ean grunted at her familiar use of his name. “So you’ve finally dispensed with pretense? This is the truth, then—what you were really after?”

  She turned a look over her shoulder, her dark eyes calculating. “We needn’t be at odds. You got what you came for, as did I.”

  “You said you wanted vengeance.”

  “Which you exacted for me when you killed the shaytan’jinn wielding deyjiin.”

  “Deyjiin.” Ean arched a brow. “How does a satrap’s agent know about deyjiin?”

  She stood slowly and faced him with a defiant set to her slanted eyes. “How does an unringed wielder defeat three dozen shaytan’jinn?”

  Ean clenched his jaw. “Step away from it.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Get your own.”

  She whispered something—it sounded a curse—and Ean felt a force hit his mental shields and invert, like a fléchette that speared thinly through his armor and then expanded. Its barbs slung outwards as it flew, tearing the flesh of his thoughts. It felt like knives were driving into his mind.

  Ean staggered back. Somehow he managed to maintain his fifth-strand shield, which was lucky, because two shuriken ricocheted off it to clatter into the tower wall instead.

  Sheih cursed him. She was reaching for another blade when Ean finally focused on her inverted pattern and unmade it. Then he grabbed the fifth and bound her arms to her sides—eliciting a gasp and a venomous glare.

  One hand hooked the front of her coat and dragged her close. “Who do you really work for?” He added a little compulsion to the question to help her answer along.

  Her eyes widened, her jaw clenched. She was resisting him.

  Ean pushed more insistently with the fourth—barely a whisper of the compulsion he was capable of, but enough to make her gasp out, “The Sorceresy! We were sent as envoys to procure a shaytan’jinn. The Advisor would not sell them to us, so we contrived to steal one. My partner died in the attempt.”

  Ean felt everything inside him tighten all at once—Arion’s memories somehow impressing upon him the import of this news. Beyond Arion’s ghostly fury, Ean recalled Isabel speaking of the Sorceresses of Vest, of their mor’alir Adepts and their twisted paths of Alir. Yes, this Sheih could be such a one as that.

  He asked in a voice gone cold with a long-forgotten anger, “What does the Vestian Sorceresy want with an eidola?” He made a dagger of this question so she wouldn’t waste his time trying to resist him.

  “To study it.” She bit the words at him like a cobra spitting venom.

  Ean’s gaze darkened. “So they can make their own?”

  Sheih narrowed her eyes into daggers of malice. “I don’t presume to question my mistresses—and neither should you.” Something both icy and searing lanced his shield into a webwork of fractures. Lightning pain seared his thigh.

  A pattern flashed into Ean’s mind just before a debilitating pain ruptured thought. Concentration fled before this onslaught, whereupon a memory surfaced—

  —Arion frowned at the curved dagger in his hands and the patterns etched into its steel. Mor’alir patterns, inverteré. They twisted the lifeforce into unrecognizable shapes, the inverted opposite of true purpose, the worst sort of corruption. The blade hummed viciously in his mind as it trapped and twisted elae, its patterns like jagged crags of dead coral twisting riptides out of the currents.

  He lifted a look of horror to Isabel. “They stabbed you with this? How did you escape it?”

  She took the blade from his fingers and returned it to its place on her wall. “You begin by reverting the pattern to its original shape…”—

  Sheih’s voice echoed to him as if spoken through a void. “Do yourself a favor, foolish prince. Find a place to hide and stay there. Everyone is looking for you. The whole world is looking for you.”

  Staggering, blinded by elae inverted—perverted—Ean sought the pattern he’d seen flash the instant before pain had pounced on him. After what seemed a lifetime, he found the pattern and pushed it concave to itself. Then he sought the pattern’s beginning and ending and unraveled it.

  The debilitating pain vanished, leaving only a dull ache in his thigh.

  Ean’s breath returned with a harsh inhale. He found himself on his side with a dagger extending from his thigh and a wide stain spreading down his pant leg. He clenched his jaw and yanked the dagger from his flesh, then grimly looked over the blade.

  Patterns similar to the ones Arion had been looking at etched the curved steel, their lines seeming to capture and hold his blood as it dripped towards the narrow tip.

  Mor’alir. Inverteré. Ean understood these terms better now. Sheih had used inverteré patterns to corrupt his shields and a mor’alir dagger to make her escape.

  Ean could see every pattern bound into the dagger, even the ones concealed by the leather-wrapped hilt, even the ones pounded deep within the folded steel. Just holding the thing revolted him.

  He pushed up to sitting and looked around. As might be expected, Sheih had vanished and taken her contraband eidola with her. Ean growled a muted curse. How many minutes had he lost to that Belloth-spawned dagger?

  At least he would know those patterns if he ever saw them again, and he would be much better prepared to handle them—handle her—the next time.

  He removed the straps from around his knees and bound his injured thigh with them instead. All the while, urgency pressed upon his thoughts. He had to find Sheih, and then he had to get out of Tambarré—and fast, before Darshan could send any more eidola after him.

  It was then that a whispering presence presented itself for his inspection. Like a courtier with a proposition, it bowed before his awareness and said as it straightened, Darshan will be expecting you to flee.

  Indeed, the whispering went on to point out that the Prophet would probably have his eidola watching every node, every outlet in or out of the city. If Ean’s only chance of success was to do the unexpected, then what could be more unexpected than going after Darshan?

  As outrageous as it appeared upon first inspection, Ean quickly began to see the possibility in it. He’d long had the feeling that he and Darshan were destined to meet. Isabel had tried to argue him out of the notion, but Ean was sure that he had to confront the man—and not at some future time when Darshan willed it, but right then, that very night, when the Prophet would be least expecting him. The thought impinged itself so determinedly upon his consciousness that he nearly gasped from the force of it.

  Yes.

  Ean would go to the temple, find the Prophet and confront him.

  Surely Darshan’s indiscriminate use of compulsion proved that he was the faceless enemy behind the Mages’ betrayal and Arion’s death. How else was Ean ever going to find out what had happened to Arion, save by confronting the man who’d murdered him?

  Ean stood and tested the muscle in his leg. It was angry, but it held his weight. Stowing Sheih’s mor’alir dagger in a spare holster, he turned his gaze towards the acropolis
. The Prophet’s al-qasr was glowing all along the crest, a lighthouse calling its sailors home.

  Ean set a course for its shores.

  Thirty-six

  “The forge of suffering produces the strongest souls. The greatest characters are seared with scars.”

  –The Elevated Teachings of Jai’Gar

  Alshiba Torinin, Seat of the realm of Alorin, sat at a table with a goblet of wine untouched in front of her. Beyond her quiet table, the balustrade of a long terrace arched outwards, offering an uninterrupted view of Illume Belliel’s azure ocean.

  To left and right of her high vantage, the mansion estates of hundreds of realms studded the lush coastline, while on the terrace immediately above her, the restaurant’s other patrons were taking their evening meal. Their quiet chatter sounded a calming hum, mingling every so often with the sound of crashing waves carried up on the breeze from far below.

  On the opposite end of the terrace, an older man sat drawing in a sketchbook, capturing the scene in pastel hues, but Alshiba saw not the impressive view, the gleaming waves, nor the richly golden sun falling towards the sea—only a wavering time stream of incomprehensible choices.

  Time’s leviathan tail undulated backwards to the horizon of her earliest days in the Sormitáge, when she’d merely admired Björn van Gelderan from afar, never imagining he would notice her. From that horizon to now, the serpent’s head lengthened, twining through such highs of experience as to leave her breathless from their memory, and diving to lows so deep that the pressure of their depths vanquished all the light from her thoughts.

  Alshiba felt that pressure now as a vice around her heart. She could barely breathe through it.

  How desperately she missed him. How furiously she wanted to upbraid him.

  Like the last time he came to you?

  What a joyless and embarrassing confrontation that had proven. She’d hardly been able to stand, much less stand up to Björn. The most mortifying part of the encounter was how desperately she’d wanted him to stay.

  Stay and reclaim his Seat. Stay and guide her in guiding the realm. Stay with her, and heal her heart.

  In the weeks since Björn’s last visit, due in no small part to Franco’s halting—if honest—explanations, Alshiba had come to understand better of what Björn was trying to accomplish. What she couldn’t understand was why he hadn’t trusted her with those truths from the beginning.

  By Cephrael’s Great Book! How could she still love a man who had so thoroughly betrayed her?

  Alshiba exhaled a tremulous breath and sank her forehead into her hands.

  ‘…He’s an easy man to admire, my brother, but a hard man to love…’

  How right Isabel had been to caution her all those years ago! Alshiba would rather have endured the unending punishment of Belloth’s thirteen hells than the eternal torment of loving Björn van Gelderan.

  “Deep thoughts, Your Excellency…or perhaps a little too much wine?”

  Alshiba lifted her head from her hands to find a tall man standing between herself and the sun. Haloed by the afternoon’s golden light, with dark hair, a close-cropped beard and a debonair stature, Mir Arkadhi had the kind of striking good looks that gave women of any age thoughts to make them blush. But while he wore charm like a cloak, the Eltanin Seat was also ruthless, cunning and endlessly dangerous—very much the product of a world whose Adepts chose the mor’alir path almost exclusively.

  “Lord Arkadhi.” She nodded to him.

  “Lady Torinin.” He nodded politely in return, a subtle smile hinting in his crystalline gaze. “May I join you?”

  With Björn so heavy in her thoughts, distracting her from what was real, Mir Arkadhi was the last person she wanted to see just then.

  Well…perhaps not the very last person.

  Wordlessly, Alshiba held a hand to the other chair at her table.

  Mir seated himself across from her and extended his long legs towards the distant railing and the view. He clinked his own glass against hers and then held it up, eyeing the ruby liquid speculatively. “Shall we share a toast, Alshiba?”

  Alshiba eyed him warily. “What would we be toasting?”

  “Progress.” He angled her a meaningful gaze, his crystalline truthreader’s eyes easily holding hers captive. “That elusive minx coveted by all.”

  Alshiba made sure the shield around her thoughts was secure. Mir was as strong in his talent as Raine D’Lacourte, and far less scrupulous in his use of it.

  She didn’t need a truthreader’s gift to know what topic he was alluding to, however. If it was possible for a realm to be comprised entirely of bankers and their darker cousins—loan sharks and bounty hunters—Eltanin would be that realm.

  “I didn’t think Eltanin looked favorably upon the Interrealm Trade Measure.”

  “On the contrary, we’re most agreeable to it.” Mir sat back in his chair and swirled his wine idly in his glass. “The more commerce, the more Eltanin’s services are required.”

  Mir already had half the Seats on the Council in his thorny debt. She could hardly imagine the horror of Eltanin opening its endless vaults to the Thousand Realms.

  Monopoly…tyranny…empire…

  Subjugation.

  These words practically shouted in her head. She couldn’t be altogether certain Mir wasn’t the one shouting them, thoughts spearing at her from behind his calculated smile. His goals…her worst nightmares.

  Alshiba picked up her wine, already feeling the urge to gulp it. One didn’t merely banter words with the Eltanin Seat. Mir put force behind his every thought and cast each with intent to wound.

  And he wanted to skirmish. This was evident. He enjoyed a sort of intelligent, deadly jousting.

  Alshiba hated it. But marching the battlefield of these machinations was her duty, the helm Björn had so indifferently left behind for her to wear, regardless of how unsuitable and ill-fitting. And on the vast battleground of Illume Belliel’s politics, one either learned quickly how to fight in multiple situations and with a host of weapons, or fell quickly to another’s lengthy and better practiced pike.

  She took a sip of wine and murmured over the rim, “I can see why that would please you.”

  Mir scratched at his jaw to cover a dark amusement. “There is a refreshing candor to the layered meaning in your words, Alshiba. But you do Eltanin an injustice. We can only be what it is in our nature to become.”

  “A view assumed by most who choose the mor’alir path.”

  He smiled, but his eyes never lost their dangerous glint. “I take it from your tone that you don’t approve of this mor’alir path. In Eltanin, there is but one path—the one we walk.”

  Alshiba smiled wryly into her wine. “Another viewpoint in common with those who walk the path of mor’alir.”

  Mir held his goblet beneath his draping fingers and angled it at her by way of emphasis. “So…Alorin’s Adepts believe there is more than one path?” He arched a raven brow. “Educate me.”

  Alshiba laughed. “Oh no. I would never presume to educate you.”

  “But you presume to disapprove of me.”

  She really laughed then. “As if you’d even bother yourself with indifference to my disapproval.”

  Mir chuckled. “You know…” he draped his arm across the back of his chair and pointed at her with one long finger, “you and I have rarely spoken.” He fixed his colorless gaze meaningfully upon her. “Why is that?”

  Because Björn warned me away from you before I ever arrived in the cityworld.

  She gave him a conciliatory smile. “Alorin has never needed Eltanin’s services.”

  “Ah, but I’m not merely speaking of our respective positions, Alshiba.”

  Despite his intimation, there were no friendships in Illume Belliel, no genuine advances, only the ploys of politics.

  “Mir,” Alshiba arched a brow as she took a sip of her wine, “are you propositioning me?”

  He seemed slightly startled—and mildly pleased—by her
bold question. “What if I was?”

  Alshiba lowered her glass slowly. “Then I would say I should need to think lengthily and carefully upon my answer.”

  Mir’s eyes glinted with dark amusement. He lifted his finger again and rolled it around at her. “A daring feint, only to fall back in a hasty retreat? Alshiba…surely you can do better than that.”

  She swallowed beneath the force of his meaning and offered a careless shrug to cover her unease. “It is as you say. We’ve never had need of each other’s services.”

  “Ah, but those were your words, Alshiba.”

  Alshiba retreated into her wine. Mir’s daggers of insinuation always drew blood. She knew well what services he hoped to gain from her now.

  Moreover, he saw that she saw it.

  Mir smiled deliberately at her. “Implementation of the new measure will be aided by establishing a common currency for trade throughout the realms. Don’t you agree?”

  She nearly choked on her wine. “A common currency,” she fought to keep her expression neutral and her voice even, “…which Eltanin is no doubt prepared to provide.”

  “Of course. No other worlds’ mints are even remotely capable of competing with Eltanin’s.”

  Alshiba could barely believe she’d heard him correctly. “Let me get this straight.” She arched a brow rather incredulously—better he saw her surprise than the horror she truly felt. “Eltanin expects to become the sole minting institution for the Thousand Realms?”

  He flashed a sinuous smile. “Perhaps you have another more qualified realm in mind.”

  “It would seem safer to diversify,” she managed somewhat breathlessly, trying to maintain a balance she didn’t feel, “perhaps to choose a metal readily available on all of the realms rather than have all the realms dependent upon the metals of one.”

  Mir eyed her quietly and fingered his dangling wine glass. “I hope this is not your final position,” he said aloud, but his thoughts said, It would pain me to have to remove you from my path, while his taunting gaze said, Then again, I might enjoy it.

  Alshiba felt each of these communications spear into her at three distinct points. Each left her composure bleeding in different ways.